How the Obama campaign 'Nate Silvered' it's polls.

[afleitch]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/21/obama-campaign-polls-2012_n_2171242.html?ref=topbar

Fascinating reading.

'Summing up the lessons learned from a massive investment in data and technology, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has a blunt message for pollsters: "We spent a whole bunch of time figuring out that American polling is broken."'

''The analytics staff also routinely combined all of their data sources -- Benenson's aggregate battleground survey, the state tracking polls, the analytical calls and even public polling data -- into a predictive model to estimate support for Obama and Romney in each state and media market. Their model had much in common with those created by Nate Silver for The New York Times and by Simon Jackman for HuffPost Pollster. It controlled for the "house effects" of each pollster or data collection method, and each nightly run of the model involved approximately 66,000 "Monte Carlo" simulations (a number frequently cited by Messina and others in recent weeks), which allowed the campaign to calculate its chances of winning each state.

The massive scope of its polling effort helped guide the Obama campaign in ways that would be impossible with conventional polling. In late October, for example, its tracking detected a roughly 5 percentage point drop in support for Obama in the Green Bay, Wis., media market. A typical tracking survey in a market that size might have only 100 interviews (with a margin of error of +/- 10 percentage points), but the Obama campaign had far more data at its disposal. "Because we were conducting close to 600 interviews in the market every three days," Simas explained, "we had confidence in the market-level decision making."

And here is the key;

''The internal polling and modeling also told the Obama campaign a different story about voter trends than that emerging from the public polls...Within 48 hours after the first presidential dbate in early October, those voters returned to Romney and the race "settled back" into the same 3-to-4 point lead for Obama across the 11 battleground states that the campaign's polling had shown all along. "Our final projection was for a 51-48 battleground-state margin for the president, which is approximately where the race ended up," Simas said.

National public polls showed bigger shifts toward Obama in September and back to Romney in early October. They also indicated a late mini-surge to Obama that his campaign's internal polling and models did not detect.'

[All Along The Watchtower]

but teh skewed polls

[Badger]

Ironically, both Obama's and Romney's campaigns saw mainstream polling as unreliable. One campaign got the actual lay of the land right while the other obviously didn't, but still, maybe Romney's campaign wasn't totally off in dismissing MSM polling.

That said, the average of most MSM polling, with some clear exceptions <coughressmussencough. Ahemgallupcough> had the race about right

[DINGO Joe]

Looks like the final margin will be about 3.5%.  That's seems on the high end of polling.