Nate Silver, the host of the FiveThirtyEight blog in the New York Times, evaluates North Carolina’s chances of being a kingmaker for President Obama. It’s more likely, Silver says, that Romney will carry the state.
Arguably Mr. Obama’s best poll of the day, instead, was an Elon University survey of North Carolina, which had a tied race there. But North Carolina may be far enough way from the electoral tipping point that it is unlikely to figure all that prominently in next Tuesday’s math. Mr. Obama could win North Carolina — the forecast model gives him about a 20 percent chance of doing so — but most of those outcomes involve cases in which Mr. Obama will already have secured enough electoral votes in states like Virginia to have clinched another term.
His evaluation is that Romney has an 81.4% chance of winning North Carolina.
— John Robinson
