Aug. 4: Likely No New Blue States in November

Saturday was a light day for polling, with only the national tracking polls and a South Dakota poll out; our forecast was essentially unchanged.

The South Dakota numbers were not bad for Mr. Obama — putting him down by 6 points, closer than the margin by which he lost the state in 2008 — but look like something of a fluke. In North Dakota, which has been more heavily polled because of the competitive Senate race there, Mr. Obama has consistently trailed by double digits.

Indeed, with the presidential election likely to be much closer than it was in 2008, Mr. Obama is unlikely to paint any new state blue this year. The forecast model gives him a 15 percent chance of carrying Montana, which has been sparsely polled; a 14 percent chance of winning Missouri; and an 8 percent chance of winning Arizona. Fourth on the list is South Dakota, where the model gives Mr. Obama about a 4 percent chance after the new survey, followed by Georgia at 2 percent.

Mr. Obama is an underdog in two states that he won in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina.

An earlier post in this space about poll oversampling was published in error and will be updated and published later this week.

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July Jobs Report Likely to Preserve Status Quo

The government reported that 163,000 payroll jobs were created in July. But the unemployment rate — which is calculated through a separate survey — ticked up to 8.3 percent from 8.2 percent.

The payrolls number taken alone is a decent one; it beat the market’s expectations of about 100,000 jobs being created.

But it is important to take the number in context. Forecasts of the payrolls numbers are quite inaccurate; they miss, on average, by 68,000 jobs in one direction or another. In this case, the miss was to the upside — and better for job-seekers than the other way around.

Still, it is hard to calculate the number of jobs in the economy at any given time, let alone to forecast it accurately. That is why, as Jonathan Bernstein advised on Thursday, and as I suggested on TimesCast, we ought to have a fairly high threshold for what qualifies as a newsworthy jobs report.

Mr. Bernstein argued that any payrolls number between 50,000 and 150,000 jobs was not likely to have much effect politically. The actual gain of 163,000 jobs sits right on the brink of that.

So it is worth looking toward tiebreakers. For instance, were there substantial revisions to the previous numbers? In this case, they were a wash; the May jobs number was revised up, but the June figure was revised down.

And you can certainly look at the unemployment rate. The survey from which those numbers are calculated is subject to more statistical noise than the payrolls numbers, but that does not mean that it is meaningless. In this case, the unemployment numbers were poor.

So I think this report ought to mostly reinforce pre-existing impressions about the economy: that the recovery is slow, but that the nation is probably not on the verge of a double-dip recession.

Politically, the status quo appears to favor President Obama. If the election were held today, he would have a 77 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, according to our forecast model’s “now-cast,” although the victory would almost certainly be by a slim margin — possibly even a victory in the Electoral College that is not reflected in the national popular vote.

By November, Mr. Obama is less certain to win, since there is more uncertainty about the economy, and other factors come into play. Our model figures that there is about a 70 percent chance that he does so.

The July jobs numbers might reduce that uncertainty slightly. Whatever impressions Americans had about the economy are likely to be reinforced by the report; Democrats will cite the relatively favorable payrolls numbers, and Republicans will trumpet the increase in the unemployment rate. There are just three more jobs reports between now and the election.

The number is favorable for Mr. Obama in the sense that no news qualifies as good news for him if he is ahead right now. But the report is not a game-changer, economically or politically.

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In Cash Push, 2 Campaigns Likely to Reject Public Funds

Aides and leading donors to Mitt Romney are preparing a major expansion of the campaign’s fund-raising efforts to prepare for a general election contest against President Obama, with the goal of raising up to $600 million, according to several people involved in the discussions.

Republican-leaning outside groups and Democratic-leaning unions are planning to spend hundreds of millions more.

And Mr. Obama, who raised $750 million in 2008, is likely to meet or exceed that this year, according to people involved in his fund-raising operation.

Those goals make it virtually certain that neither party’s nominee will accept public funds for the general election or the spending limits that come with them — the likely death knell for a cornerstone of the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms intended to limit the influence of money in federal elections.

Mr. Obama opted out of the public financing program in 2008, breaking a campaign pledge, and went on to outspend the Republican nominee, John McCain, by four to one.

“This is going to be the most moneyed election in the history of the United States,” said Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, a group that favors greater restrictions on campaign spending. Mr. Edgar, a former congressman who was among the Democratic “Watergate babies” elected in the wake of the scandal, added, “There is a sense of coming full circle, of forgetting our history — the reason we installed a system for financing campaigns that didn’t rely on corporate or wealthy money.”

Mr. Obama has already held over a hundred major fund-raisers for his campaign, jointly raising large amounts with the Democratic National Committee, and Mr. Romney is moving quickly to catch up. His campaign is planning dozens of fund-raisers through the end of June, high-dollar events that will feature Mr. Romney as well as the campaign’s top allies and other elected officials.

The campaign is setting a goal of raising at least $1 million for most events featuring Mr. Romney personally.

Those efforts will be aided by a new joint fund-raising agreement with the Republican National Committee that allows Mr. Romney to command far larger checks than he has during the primaries, when his campaign was limited to increments of $2,500 or less. Under the agreement, guests at major Romney events will be able to write checks as large as $75,000 to a “Romney Victory” committee.

About half of that sum would go to Mr. Romney’s campaign or the Republican committee, mimicking the arrangement under which Mr. Obama, as an incumbent, has been raising money since last spring for his campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The remainder will be split among Republican state parties in Massachusetts, Idaho, Oklahoma and Vermont — where party leaders are deemed loyal to Mr. Romney — and later re-allocated to the most critical battleground states.

“It’s going to ramp up dramatically,” said Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets and one of Mr. Romney’s national finance co-chairmen. “The response I’ve been getting, of people willing to max out on the victory side, has been very very good, very enthusiastic.”

Restore Our Future, the “super PAC” whose millions of dollars in negative advertising helped bury Mr. Romney’s Republican rivals, will also shift its focus to the general election, officials familiar with its plans said. The group, which raised more than $43 million through the end of February, is hoping to reach the $100 million mark by the end of the cycle.

The super PAC will also have help from Mr. Romney’s allies and backers: Jim Talent, the former United States senator and a key surrogate for Mr. Romney during the primaries, appeared at a Restore Our Future briefing for donors in New York on Wednesday.

And people involved with the group’s fund-raising have in recent days approached Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner whose family contributed over $16 million to a rival super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, to consider contributing to Restore Our Future. They have also approached Charles and David Koch, the wealthy conservative businessmen who founded Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

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