The past ten days have shook the financial and whole worlds.  Earlier this week we looked over a cliff and listened to Republicans who assured us that the Free Market Economies were “safe.” The result has been a huge bounce for Barack Obama.  FiveThirtyEight.com, our favorite poll watcher site now estimates that the chances are better than two to one in Barack’s favor.  That’s almost as stunning as picking a moose hunter as Vice President!

Five Thirty Eight.com Poll Results
September 19th 2008

Let’s not equivocate too much here.  Over the course of the past several days, there has been a rather dramatic shift in this election toward Barack Obama. Our trend line estimate, which is engineered to be fairly conservative, registers the swing as equaling roughly 4 points over the course of the past week.

Changes of this velocity are unusual outside of the convention periods and the debates, especially in close elections. It took John McCain about 60 days and tens of millions of advertising dollars to whittle Obama’s lead down from roughly 5 points at its peak in early June, to the 1-point lead that Obama held heading into the conventions. Obama has swing the numbers that much in barely a week.

Of course, we never really were entirely outside of gravitational field of the conventions, and probably at least half of this bounceback for Obama is merely the more-or-less inevitable consequence of McCain’s convention bounce ending. But the fact is that Obama is in a stronger position now than he was immediately before the conventions. We now have him winning the election 71.5 percent of the time, which is about as high as that number has been all year.

There are two reasons why that number is as high as it is. Firstly, we are more than halfway through the penultimate month of the campaign, so even relatively small leads are fairly meaningful. But secondly, Obama has developed a structural advantage in the Electoral College that is understated by the popular vote margin. If we break the election down into its four fundamental scenarios, it looks like this:

62.5% Obama wins Popular Vote and Electoral College

0.7% Obama wins Popular Vote, loses Electoral College

27.8% McCain wins Popular Vote and Electoral College

9.0% McCain wins Popular Vote, loses Electoral College

Click here to read more at FiveThirtyEight.com.

Posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 11:10 pm in National News.