Modeler Predicts Romney Will Win Ohio by 12 Percent

Could Obama be down by 12 points in Ohio? Modeling, as opposed to polling, is another method of political prognostication. By using exit polling from past elections one can discern the number of Democrats and the number of Republicans who voted for their party's candidate in past elections. Also one could know the percentages of independents who normally vote Democrat and the percentages voting Republican. If one knows how many Democrats, Republicans, and independents there are in a state one would have a fair chance of calling the election right. It's something like reading a racing form in that it requires interpretation of data from past performance.
From Clinton Cooper's Election Insight;

"Cuyahoga County has historically been a bell weather county for determining the outcome of elections in Ohio. Not in direct terms of saying that if Candidate A wins Cuyahoga County by x percentage of points that he will win Ohio by x percentage of votes, but that Cuyahoga County has a large enough number of registered voters that you can statistically determine how many total votes each candidate will get in Ohio based on how many votes are cast for each party in Cuyahoga County."

Here is where it gets tricky. Will Cuyahoga County continue to be a bell weather county after losing 208,207 voters since 2008? The entire state of Ohio lost 490,000 voters during the same period. The article is a marvelous piece of reasoning and deduction and readers are urged to read it in its entirety but here is the bottom line.

"Obama will receive 2,215,978 votes and Romney would win 2,829,037 votes if 7.5% of the total votes cast for Republicans were cast in Cuyahoga County. Romney would win 56.1% of the Ohio’s vote to Obama’s 43.9% with a turnout percentage of 64.67%".
Keep this post in mind on election night!