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July 14: Another Recount in Florida?

We haven’t usually been running forecast updates on the weekend, but a Florida poll will always get our attention. In this case, it’s a new poll from Mason-Dixon, released on Saturday, that shows President Obama with a nominal 1-percentage-point lead there over Mitt Romney.

Our model shows Florida as close as can be. It projects the Nov. 6 result as Mr. Obama 49.5 percent, Mr. Romney 49.4 percent — an outcome that would be close enough to trigger another recount.

Mr. Obama has led in the majority of Florida polls recently — five of seven since June 1. The model hedges against these polls a bit because Florida is normally a bit Republican-leaning and its economy is doing quite poorly. That’s how it gets a tie there.

Still, Mr. Obama’s polling in Florida seems to have improved by a percentage point or so since a couple of months ago, at a time when national polls have generally been quite steady. That has brought it a bit closer to the national average and increased its ranking on our list of tipping point states that are most likely to decide the election.

Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.

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