IF THERE is one thing America’s right- and left-leaning media seem to agree on as election day looms, it is that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are locked in an exceedingly close and unpredictable race for the presidency. “With Time as Tight as Race, Romney and Obama Zero In”, ran a recent headline in the New York Times; “Obama and Romney Deadlocked”, concurs the Wall Street Journal. Even the most esteemed news outlets from abroad—such as, say, The Economist—pronounce it “about as close as it could be”. If people who can barely agree on the colour of the sky can find common cause on this point, we can surely take it for granted and move along, right? Strangely, what might be the least controversial notion in contemporary American politics is also one of the farthest from the truth. Yes, the national polls are roughly tied. But unlike every other civilised country with a presidential system of democracy, we don’t have a national popular vote. And the state polls—which collectively represent a much bigger sample of voters than the national ones, and enable us to project what matters, which is the electoral college—tell a very different tale. There are indeed a number of states that are extremely close. Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire could easily go either way, and Florida and Iowa are still highly competitive. However, none of these states are likely to have an impact on the outcome of the election. There are 19 states, totalling 237 electoral votes, which are so safely Democratic that Mr Romney did not bother to contest any of them until the final weeks of the campaign: CA, OR, WA, NM, MN, IL, MI, PA, HI, DE, MD, DC, NJ, NY, VT, CT, RI, MA and ME. Beyond those, Mr Obama appears to have an unassailable lead in Nevada, and the presence of Paul Ryan on the Republican ticket does not seem to have moved the needle in Mr Romney’s favour in Wisconsin. Adding those two states to the president’s tally, all he needs is Ohio to reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes—and he has consistently led the polls there by over two percentage points. Even if Mr Romney wins all of Colorado, Virginia, New Hampshire, Florida and Iowa, he would still lose the election if he cannot break through Mr Obama’s Midwestern “firewall” of Wisconsin and Ohio. The campaign is being fought almost entirely on Mr Romney’s turf.

Mr Romney faces such an uphill battle in the electoral college that most quantitative calculations regard the race as anything but too close to call. Nate Silver of the New York Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog, the best-known of the forecasters, currently gives Mr Obama an 86% chance to win. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium puts him at an even more generous 98%.

Bettors broadly concur with this analysis. Although Intrade, the most widely cited prediction market, is fairly kind to Mr Romney and shows him with a 33% chance of victory, tight legal restrictions on deposits to the site have made it very difficult for Americans to wager there. That makes it very thinly traded and unreliable, since bets of just a few thousand dollars can move the market price substantially. The real money laid on the election goes to bookmakers, who uniformly see Mr Obama as an overwhelming favourite. Pinnacle Sports in Las Vegas shows him with a 77.5% likelihood of victory, and Ladbrokes in Britain has him at 81%.

So why do so many reporters continue to peddle the notion of a tight race? One hypothesis is simply a healthy scepticism regarding statistical models, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis. Both David Brooks of the New York Times and John Cassidy of the New Yorker, while openly admiring Mr Silver’s work, warn that complex calculations can lead to unjustified certainty.

That may be true, but there’s nothing particularly convoluted about these methods. The Occam’s Razor approach of a simple average of the most recent polls, listed at RealClearPolitics.com, leads to exactly the same conclusion: that Mr Obama has small but significant leads in enough states to win the election. Some critics have argued that the state polls are biased towards Mr Obama because they overestimate Democratic turnout, but the historical evidence suggests otherwise.

A second interpretation, put forth by Alec MacGillis of the New Republic, is that the media are simply responding to institutional incentives. No one will stay tuned in to a programme saying that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Suspense sells, and given a choice between a story and no story, journalists will always choose the former, regardless of their political leanings.

This account has undeniable “Freakonomics”-style appeal. However, it relies on a misunderstanding of the competitive dynamics among reporters. Prestige media organisations strive perhaps above all to be counterintuitive, and attract readers or viewers by debunking conventional wisdom. Publications like Slate, the Atlantic or the New Republic are often mocked for their knee-jerk contrarianism. Do writers really think they are going to attract precious eyeballs by jumping on the “it’s-coming-down-to-the-wire” bandwagon? Quite the opposite—I’m betting that the “reality check: Obama’s ahead” premise of this post will garner far more traffic.

I think two entirely different factors underlie the misleading coverage. The first is a modest dose of innumeracy. Reporters lacking statistical training who see a two-point lead for a candidate are likely to think, “That doesn’t sound like much. After all, the margin of error is four points, so it’s a statistical tie.” Actually, it’s not—it just means that particular pollster didn’t find a big enough gap to achieve 95% certainty that one candidate is ahead. Once you start talking about dozens of polls taken by independent firms that all point in the same direction, the sample sizes go up and the margin of error shrinks. As Mr Silver recently noted, the consensus of state polls in recent years has been remarkably accurate: it has called 74 of 77 states right, and two of the three misses occurred when the leading candidate had an advantage of one percentage point or less. Mr Obama leads all of Nevada, Wisconsin and Ohio by 2.8 points or more in the RealClearPolitics average. Mr Obama may not be likely to win those states, and therefore the election, by a particularly large margin, but that does not mean he is at substantial risk of losing them.

The other explanation is the old “false balance” problem. Reporters have long relied on the crutch of simply quoting representatives of both sides of an issue to appear impartial to their readers, even if one is much further from the truth than the other. To correct this tendency, the media have increasingly deployed “fact-checking” squads who are willing to call a candidate a liar when they deem it appropriate. This, in turn, has prompted a backlash from politicians and critics who sniff bias in purportedly objective fact-checking.

While not yet chastened, the fact-checkers have done their best to stick to debunking the most easily identifiable fibs. Poll analysis does not meet this standard. The Democrats say Mr Obama’s ahead in the key states; the Republicans counter that the national polls are tied, and that the state polls suffer from unsubstantiated assumptions and methodological deficiencies. Who’s right? “Who knows?”, a reporter on a tight deadline is likely to conclude. “Let’s just cite both arguments and say that time will tell.”

Time will tell indeed. Mr Romney certainly has a fighting chance, and if he wins, it won’t discredit Mr Silver. The proper way to evaluate forecasters is to look at all of their predictions, and see if events they say should happen 80% of the time fail to occur in around 20% of cases. (It would cast doubt on Mr Wang’s approach, however, since he sees Mr Obama as a virtual lock for a second term.) For the baseball fans among you, Mr Romney is in roughly the same position as a team starting the bottom of the ninth inning trailing by one run; for the poker players, he’s all-in holding pocket kings facing an opponent with pocket aces. But that’s nobody’s definition of a toss-up. Following Mr Silver’s lead, if anyone would like to offer me a wager, the comment thread beckons.

Addendum: The last batch of national polls moved in Mr Obama’s favour. Mr Silver’s final estimate of his chance of re-election is 92%.

(Photo credit: AFP)