I really hope Munroe's right, and that Obama wins, but I think that 91% is too high. An October surprise could drive a large move, which would make the states v

I really hope Munroe's right, and that Obama wins, but I think that 91% is too high. An October surprise could drive a large move, which would make the states very highly correlated. This is much like what often occurs in the stock market. Individual stocks might be only mildly correlated (0.1 - 0.4) in general, but in a crash (or rally) the correlations converge upon 1. Elections are full of last-minute "crashes" and "rallies". My market on an Obama win is 70-74. I'm including the very serious possibility of election tampering favoring the Republicans, as many allege occurred in 2004, as well as (alas) the Bradley effect. It's difficult to place probabilities on unprecedented, infrequent events, and this is an unprecedented presidential election, not only because Obama is black-- that's only a small component-- but because he's an entirely different kind of political candidate than we've seen in the past, and because we're frankly in a very different country in 2008 than we were in during 2000 or '04.