Umm...okay. Walk me through what's false about that statement then.

Here's how it looks to me.

Nate Silver's analysis: True, it is indeed an analysis done by Nate Silver to attempt to predict the outcome of the election based on historical data.

Shows the election a stone coinflip: Pretty reasonably statement; if swinging is correct in that Obama's approval was 45 percent when he posted that, then definitely true.

Come on, man. Any reasonable person who knows who Nate Silver is and what he does, on reading that statement, will assume that 538 has very recently published a blog entry in which Nate claims that the general election is a toss up. He hasn't. He hasn't even started to post forecasts yet.

Any other interpretation of the statement is just playing semantic games.

So you made a snarky empty checkbox reply (that was wrong on every level) because the link didn't live up to your expectations? Very well done.

Just. Wow. That is possibly the worst way you could measure if a politician is perceived as more centrist.

Romney is getting the bounce of being an unknown. Unknown generic politicians always do better than known ones. He also gets to be the other guy in an election with a poor but improving economy. When the election properly starts people will really see what he is about and polling is basically pointless right now, even really specific state by state polling.

LMAO at Romney being an "unknown" by anyone aware enough to find Florida on a map.

A very large chunk of the voting class could not pick Romney out of a line up.

Another large chunk knows his face and name and that's about it.

Riverman cant even name half a dozen policies including details of his economic plans in an election based around economic plans. Rmoney is the definition of unknown regardless of people knowing his name, mostly as "that out of touch rich guy comedians keep mocking" or "the other guy in the election".

Which is pretty lol considering how much he's spent on campaigning.

Well when all of your campaigning is based on negative ads of your opponents, it is hard to establish who you are beyond random rich guy running for president.

Actually I was probably wrong to laugh at him being unknown. After all, this board should be fairly aware and so many can say with a straight face that hes socially ultra conservative.

Or maybe.....

No, you're just wrong. The actual cause isn't the speculators, it's the risk to supply. The speculating is a positive reaction to that risk.

Complete crap.

The link to the graph I posted has been in the "Obama's reelection chances" thread many times and the link itself is 538blahblahblah. It IS Nate Silver's work.

He did a statistical analysis in Jan 2011 looking retrospectively at all incumbent re-elections since FDR and correlated re-election chances with Gallup approval ratings.

Looking at said graph shows, by Mr. Silver's analysis in his Jan 2011 blog, that if the election were held today, by his analytic technique, it would be a toss-up.

That's all I said. I didn't say, "Today..... Nate Silver got off his high horse and stated with metaphysical certitude blah, blah blah would happen."

But of course, since you guys all fawn over "Nate", and his analysis isn't very favorable to your guy and your ingrained meme, by all means , attack the syntax of my writing and not the unassailable truth I put forward, which is buttressed by all the polling this past week since Frothy's departure which shows the election very, very close.

If you are actually interested in Mr Silver's analysis:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes...election-odds/

Hell, in the article just linked nate makes a big point about how approval ratings are very important at this stage.

To quote you, Phill.... wow, just wow!

Romney is "unknown" in America. This guy that won 11 states 4 yrs ago in the 2008 primary where he ran second to Mc Cain and has been the GOP frontrunner from jump street this time around. But nobody "knows" Romney in America. Honestly, what else is there to say. Oh wait.... he also won the Governor's election in the People's Republic of Massachusetts!

But nobody in America "knows" him.

Here's what they DO know: He's the capitalist in the race and the other guy is the Euro Social Democrat.