To be clear, the model has shown a favorable trend for Mr. Obama lately. His chances of winning the Electoral College rose to 73.3 percent on Wednesday, a new high. His projected margin of victory over Mr. Romney in the national popular vote, 2.8 percentage points, is also a new high.
But the shift is more because the consensus of evidence has been slightly favorable to Mr. Obama than any one piece of evidence pointing toward a major inflection point in the race.
The economic numbers are still very mixed, but the jobs report was better in July, personal income growth has been accelerating and the stock market has been rallying. I’m certainly not going to render a prediction about the long-term future of the euro zone, but it now seems less likely that it will blow up soon enough to substantially affect the election in November. (Perhaps whichever candidate wins will have a huge mess on his hands in 2013 instead.)
Mr. Obama has also had a fairly strong set of polls from swing states. It’s just not a good sign for Mr. Romney that he’s down in almost all polls of Ohio, and more often than not, in polls of Florida and Virginia as well — although he has posted some better numbers in Colorado recently.
Finally, and despite my earlier caution about how time in a campaign should be measured on a relative rather than absolute scale, we are seeing some time tick off the clock. Mr. Obama is almost certainly ahead right now, so any day that the status quo is preserved is basically a good one for him.
