FiveThirtyEight: Obama 84% to win the Electoral College

Nate Silver, the polls and stats analyst whose FiveThirtyEight forecasts runs in the New York Times, wrote Saturday that President Obama is "now better than a 4-in-5 favorite to win the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. His chances of winning it increased to 83.7 percent on Friday, his highest figure since the Denver debate and improved from 80.8 percent on Thursday."

Friday’s polling should make it easy to discern why Mr. Obama has the Electoral College advantage. There were 22 polls of swing states published Friday. Of these, Mr. Obama led in 19 polls, and two showed a tie. Mitt Romney led in just one of the surveys, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida.

On Saturday night, Silver tweeted "lots of polls but little change in tonight's 538 forecast. Obama 84% to win Electoral College." But he then amended a bit, tweeting: "Sorry, we entered a Montana poll with the candidates' names reversed. Re-running forecast." That was three hours ago and there has been no update.

The latest on his blog.