I teach a political participation course, and when the course overlaps with a presidential election, I have the students form into small groups, where they analyze all the available data out there, and make a prediction. All the groups have Obama winning the election (see plot below). On the low end, Group 4 has Obama winning only 291 electoral votes, and on the high end, Group 7 has Obama winning 353 votes. Most of the groups have Obama winning in the low 300s and McCain in the low 200s. I guess we’ll see on election night which group is the closest to the actual outcome (there’s some extra credit points riding on this).
