Presidential Election Prediction...

I think President Obama will win a second term.

I think it will be a close margin of victory in the popular vote, I expect a margin of less than 1.75%

I think Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College by a larger margin, I suspect in the (+) 50-70 range over Mitt Romney's total electoral count.

I base this on the approach many forecasters such as Nate Silver of the 538 Blog and Sam Wong of the Princeton Election Consortium. We don't elect our President ever four years by a straight national vote. We essentially have fifty separate State elections, which then (usually) yields enough electoral votes, 270 being required, to determine the winner.

While the national polls look very close, too close to call in fact, the State polls are far more revealing. No one will be surprised if Obama wins California or if Romney wins Texas. So we don't spend a lot of time studying those states. Our time is better served and a clearer picture of what may happen on Tuesday comes from looking at the battleground state polls. In short, I'll defer to Mr. Silver in Friday's 538 column:

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.

Unless all the State polls are biased and under-estimating Mr. Romney's chances, it doesn't look good for seeing a Republican in the White House anytime soon. 

I will acknowledge a warped sense of respect for much of the far right who has been using white hot rhetoric, often in lieu of factual information, in their case against President Obama. Its been tempting for me to lower my expectations for this election, especially given my location here in Southwest Ohio. In the end though, what I see daily in this part of the country is being addressed in the state polls and ultimately, I don't think, will make a difference.