SAY GOODBYE TO ROMNEY 9.0 (OR WHATEVER VERSION HE'S UP TO NOW)

I’m feeling pretty good this election day.

Good enough to blog!

My election day prediction, a personal tradition since my tour-de-force forecast of a McGovern victory in 1972 (I've tweaked my forecasting model a bit since then), is for a comfortable Obama victory.

Virtually all the polls of Ohio have Obama winning (by margins of between 1 and 6%), which is probably enough to guarantee him the necessary 270 electoral votes.  I don’t expect Ohio to be particularly close, so I actually think Obama will be called the winner after the polls close out west, sometime before midnight. Obama also has done well in the latest polls of the other swing states.   Besides Ohio, I think Obama will definitely win Penn. (not really a swing state), NH, Iowa, Wis., CO and Nevada, and will probably also win VA.  While I’m counting FL and NC for Romney, I think Obama has a decent shot at winning FL and an outside shot at winning NC. So my best guess is that Obama is reelected with an Electoral College margin of at least 303 to 235 (as compared to his 365 to 173 victory in 2008).

I also doubt that there will be an electoral college-popular vote split as some pundits have been suggesting. Obama’s ticked up a bit in the latest national polls (Maybe Sandy was good for something!), which basically range from Romney ahead by 1 to Obama ahead by 4. These, however, are polls of likely voters; Obama does a bit better among all registered voters. The actual result usually lies somewhere between the likely and registered voter poll results. So, I’ll go out on a limb and predict Obama wins with a national popular vote margin of between 3 and 5 points.

I’ll also predict the Dems gain a net two seats in the Senate for a 55-45 margin and gain 15 seats in the House to end up on the short side of a 227-208 margin.

Come Wednesday morning, Romney can go back to one of his homes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Michigan, Utah or California. Or he can visit his money in the Cayman Islands.