According to Real Clear Politics, Mitt Romney is, on average, up by one point in the polls. According to both Nate Silver and InTrade, President Obama has a better-than-60-percent chance of winning the election. I think it's fair to say that the election is, for the moment, close. 
 
 But not according to Gallup. Their seven-day tracking poll shows Romney up by seven points — yes, seven — with likely voters. But he's only up by one point with registered voters. 
 
 It gets weirder: Dig into the poll, and you'll find that in the most recent internals they've put on their Web site — which track from 10/9-10/15 — Obama is winning the West (+6), the East (+4), and the Midwest (+4). The only region he's losing is the South. But he's losing the South, among likely voters, by 22 points. That's enough, in Gallup's poll, for him to be behind in the national vote. But it's hard to see how that puts him behind in the electoral college. 
 
 If Gallup is right, then that looks to me like we're headed for an electoral college/popular vote split. Last night, I spoke with Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, to ask him if I was missing something. He said I wasn't. "That's certainly what it looks like," he says. 
 
 But Newport was cautious in interpreting his numbers. Gallup's poll cheered Romney supporters because it showed Romney gaining ground even after the second debate. But Newport didn't see it like that. Remember, he warned, it's a seven-day poll. "I think we're still seeing leftover positive support for Romney and I don't think we're seeing impact yet from the second debate," he says. 
 
 What you think is going on in the race depends on whether you think the electorate will ultimately look more like Gallup's "likely voter" model, where the race is a blowout, or all registered voters, where it's a dead heat. So I asked Newport to explain the likely voter model to me. 
 
 "The likely voters model takes into account changes in the response to questions about how closely they're following and how enthusiastic they are," he said. "It's not just capturing underlying movement — it's representing changes in enthusiasm." 
 
 That sounds, I replied, like a model that would tend to overstate the effects of major events that favored one candidate or the other, as their supporters would grow temporarily more enthusiastic and attentive, while the other side would grow temporarily disillusioned. Newport agreed. "I wouldn't use the word 'overstate,' " he said. "But it would be very sensitive to changes in enthusiasm. The Denver debate clearly had an impact on Romney's people. I think your insight is correct there. Whether we see a dulling of that over the next several days is what I want to see." ||||| While many conservatives look to former Clinton political consultant Dick Morris to understand the polls and political surveys on the elections, or even a site like UnSkewedPolls.com, those on the left look to New York Times blogger Nate Silver. Silver had a background in analyzing and writing about baseball that Wikipedia describes as, “Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009." 
 
 Silver currently writes about the polls and politics at a web site called FiveThirtyEight.com that is affiliated with the New York Times. His currect projections of the presidential race look quite favorable to the incumbent, President Obama, both nationally and especially in the swing states. Routinely he assigns percentage odds of a candidate (usually his beloved Obama) winning a state far higher and disproportionate any reasonable odds of that candidate winning a state as indicated by the polls. 
 
 His blog site has an article yesterday arguing that Mitt Romney's momentum in the polls has stopped. This is wishful thinking of a liberal given that the polls continue to improve for Mitt Romney. He still has Obama winning in Virginia and Colorado even though the most recent and credible polls in those states show Romney winning them. He gives Obama a 73.4 percent chance of winning Ohio, which is downright absurd, as Rasmussen has the candidate tied in Ohio, which really means the undecided voters tip the state of Ohio to Romney if the election were held today. So much for that fantasy-land 73.4 percent chance of Obama winning Ohio. 
 
 Apparently, Nate Silver has his own way of “skewing” the polls. He appears to look at the polls available and decide which ones to put more “weighting” on in compiling his own average, as opposed to the Real Clear Politics average, and then uses the average he calculates to determine that percentages a candidate has of winning that state. He labels some polling firms as favoring Republicans, even if they over sample Democrats in their surveys, apparently because he doesn't agree with their results. In the end the polls are gerrymandering into averages that seem to suit his agenda to make the liberal Democrats candidates apparently strong than they are. 
 
 He claims to have been highly accurate in predicting the 2008 election results, and perhaps he was. But it's highly unlikely his current methods and projections will have the level of accuracy unless he changes then quite a lot between now and election day. The race has shifted profoundly in favor of Mitt Romney while Nate Sillver is still projecting an Obama win. Unless he changes that, the credibility he earned in 2008 will be greatly diminished after this years election. 
 
 Note: This article has been edited to remove a paragraph that the author believes was inappropriate and has apologized for, and therefore has removed it. 
 
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 Read more articles at RightNewsNow.com ||||| Mitt Romney continues his rise, according to a Gallup poll released today that suggests he has a seven-point national lead over President Obama. 
 
 The tracking poll, which surveyed likely voters, put Romney ahead 52-45, Gallup reported. 
 
 The poll, experts cautioned, is one of several that should be gauged to get an accurate assessment of the status of the campaign. 
 
 An ABC News/Washington Post survey of likely voters from Oct. 15 had Obama leading Romney 49-46. 
 
 Nicolle Wallace, a top aide to Sen. John McCain during his 2008 run and current ABC News analyst, said "the numbers [in the Gallup poll] suggest that the first debate permanently liberated Romney from the caricature that had been created by the Obama campaign's ad onslaught and by Romney's own high profile gaffes. 
 
 "If his numbers hold up after his second -- weaker -- debate performance, the Romney campaign will go into the final two weeks with understandable confidence," she said. 
 
 Neither the Romney nor the Obama campaigns addressed the latest figures. 
 
 The Gallup poll released today presents a rolling average of results gathered during the past week. So any boost Obama might have gained from his more energetic showing in New York Tuesday night is still mostly missing. 
 
 Gallup's Oct. 23 report, which will account for all seven days after that second debate, will offer a more clear look at the landscape. 
 
 Others were more cautious about the results of the poll. 
 
 Stu Rothenberg, author of the respected Rothenberg Political Report, said, "It seems awful big to me, especially since Gallup has shown Obama's job approval rising." 
 
 "I would urge real caution on just accepting face value on single survey, no matter who it is. ... I'd want to see other polls showing the same thing before I jump to conclusions," Rothenberg warned. 
 
 Another expert on presidential races, Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report, was also wary. 
 
 "I like Gallup but have a strong sense that this is an outlier, that Romney was, pre-debate, probably ahead nationally by low single digits," he told ABC News.
– The latest Gallup poll suggests that Mitt Romney is still riding the wave from the first debate with a full 7-point lead nationally. Be skeptical, writes poll guru Nate Silver at the New York Times. Almost all other polls have the race roughly even or with Obama ahead. Silver offers a lengthy analysis, arguing that Gallup has a bad track record in similar instances over recent election cycles. Bottom line: "It's much more likely that Gallup is wrong and everyone else is right than the other way around." Ezra Klein at the Washington Post also sounds doubtful. He thinks Gallup's method of surveying likely voters, rather than registered voters, sounds like "a model that would tend to overstate the effects of major events that favored one candidate or the other, as their supporters would grow temporarily more enthusiastic and attentive, while the other side would grow temporarily disillusioned." Conservatives, though, are livid that Romney isn't getting credit for the poll and are going after Silver in particular given his status as a numbers whiz. "Anyone's who's pegging Obama at a 64.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College at this point's obviously running a couple of quarts low already," writes Donald Douglas at the American Power blog.