I'll be very interested at the results from Maine in this presidential election. This is the first one where they (or any US state at this level for that matter) are using a ranked choice voting. Seeing what the first choices of the people in Maine really are will certainly be interesting, as now voting for your preferred candidate instead of one of the big 2 as your first choice shouldn't be considered a wasted vote there anymore (though probably many still have that mentality).

Just for the funzies, let's look at how elections turned out since the last great realignment, compared to where they stood about now:

Presidential national average lead, 17 days before E-day:

1992: Clinton +11.1*
1996: Clinton +13.8*
2000: Bush +3.1*
2004: Bush +3.4
2008: Obama +5.6
2012: Obama +0.1
2016: Clinton +6.4
2020: Biden: +10.6

* for the month of October as a whole.

Final stats, popular vote:

1992: Clinton +5.6 (5.5 toward Rep)
1996: Clinton +8.5 (5.3 toward Rep)
2000: Gore +0.5 (3.6 toward Dem)
2004: Bush: +2.5 (0.9 toward Dem)
2008: Obama: +7.3 (1.7 toward Dem)
2012: Obama: +3.9 (3.8 toward Dem)
2016: Clinton: +2.1 (4.3 toward Rep)

Average shift: +0.85 toward Rep
Predicted Biden margin: +5.1 to +14.4 (median +9.75)
Predicted EVs, assuming the same partisan lean as 2016: 308-230 to 422-125

Conclusions: October polls are a strong indicator of the end result and either a) the Clintons always underperform their polls badly; or b) stronger third-party voting correlates with Republicans making up some ground.

While we're talking about Clinton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iXfk-2eOAc

Even if the polls were even more wrong as they were in 2016, Biden would still win the election with his current polling advantage.

Was 2012 really THAT close?
I was in my junior year of high school at the time and the general consensus at school was that Obama was going to get reelected.

For those wondering whether the Hunter Biden story will be as big as the Comey letter... probably not.

I'm judging this by looking at our fair and balanced Friends over at Fox News. I don't think there's any serious doubt that their agenda is to get Trump reelected. If you doubt that, you should be laughed out of this topic, and generally off of the Earth.

So, with that in mind, looking at their website, we don't actually see much about Hunter Biden on their frontpage. There's one story about it on the front page, but it's more focused on Twitter blocking the story then on the story itself. There's a couple of videos but they're again only sort of related to the topic. It's the Whitehouse's response to the story being called disinformation, and Wallace saying he's "suspicious". Out of about 36 videos and stories on their front page, there are about 3 links, and again, the most prominent one is more about Twitter than the story itself.

This seems to indicate that Fox News doesn't think they have a winner on their hands with this story. It's a bit tough to compare since the layout of the site is different, but on November 1st 2016, of the 35 news items on the frontpage, 12 of them related to Hillary Clinton's emails including basically all of the most prominently featured stories.. If one looked at this page, they might not even know who she was running against, as Trump's name is only mentioned once on the site... cause I guess nothing he did was newsworthy?

Point is that if Fox News thought they had something good here, they'd be hammering it like their name was jumpman. The fact that they're not really harping on this seems to show that they don't think they have a winner on their hands.

It sort of was... but also not really.

On a national level it was close. In the electoral college it wasn't. 

Florida was won by about 1%. Ohio by 2%, and Virginia by 3%. Romney won North Carolina by 2%.

Even if Romney had retained North Carolina, and won in Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, Obama would have still won the election, albeit by a very narrow margin. In that scenario, Romney still would have had to win in Colorado, where he lost by about 4.7%.

So, the popular vote was somewhat close, but there still wasn't an easy path for Romney to win. Even if Romney had performed 3.8% better in the national, he still probably would not have won the electoral college. 

Makes me a little sad.  I like Romney (even if he was kinda rude to me one time when were in line at cafe rio together).  I think he would have been a really good president.  He wasn’t the greatest campaigner though...

Something I found very interesting: 

I'm tired of people knocking our stable genius of a president. He is perfectly covfefe.

SNLs take on the debate. I was amused. Best part is Maya Rudolph calling out the obvious plant.