President Obama’s chances of winning the Electoral College declined to 66.9 percent from 68.3 percent as a result of the mediocre jobs report and the attendant decline in the stock market, both of which are accounted for by the FiveThirtyEight forecast model.
For much of this election cycle, the volume of polling has exceeded the amount of meaningful political news, but we may be in the opposite situation now. With the sluggish volume of polling around the Fourth of July holiday, it is still hard to tell what, if any, impact last week’s Supreme Court’s ruling on Mr. Obama’s health care bill might have had on the race. And none of the polls yet account for Friday morning’s jobs report. I generally urge against over-interpreting small shifts in the polls, but the national and state polling data that we will see over the next week or two may be more informative than usual.