PEC struggling back online after this morning’s outage.

The “Meta-margin” shows that state polls would have to swing toward Mitt Romney by 2.6% to tie the race. This Meta-Margin differs by about 3.0% from national polls. I regard this as the big current mystery. While we bring PEC back online, I am doing analysis to understand the difference. Swing-state polls were dead-on in 2004 and 2008, suggesting either national-poll methods or non-swing state opinion as the culprits.

The possibilities are either systemic problems with national polling that lead to a heavy Republican lean or epic level white hatred of Obama in large population red states like Georgia and Texas that aren’t nearly so present in swing states. Both explanations are possible, both Gallup and Rasmussen’s likely voter models and methods have been dissected to find major flaws but that doesn’t explain most of the difference. There’s been discussion about the cell phone gap and non-spanish language polling skewing numbers, but those should hit swing state and national polls equally. Something, seems to be causing such a significant divergence.