The Election Model utilizes the latest state and national polls to determine the winner of the True Vote.
Of course, it assumes that the election is held on the date of the most recent polling update.

In projecting the True vote, the implicit assumption is that the election will be fraud-free.
But the recorded vote is never equal to the True Vote.
The evidence is overwhelming: millions of mostly Democratic votes are uncounted in every election.

Therefore, the Election Model cannot accurately project the official, recorded vote.
If it did, then the polling data was wrong and/or the projection assumptions were invalid.

In 2000, 110.8 million votes were cast, but only 105.4 million recorded,
In 2000, 125.7 million votes were cast, but only 122.3 million recorded.
Why should 2008 be any different?
It is a certainty that millions of votes will be uncounted.
It is also a certainty that more than one million Democratic voters will be disenfranchised.

Can we expect that DRE touch screens, without a verifiable vote count, will not be rigged?
Can we expect that central vote tabulating software will not be tampered with?

Obama’s True Vote (T) will be reduced by uncounted (U), switched votes (S).
The recorded vote formula is: R = T – U – S (not including the disenfranchised)
The bottom line is that Obama will need a landslide to overcome the multiple levels of fraud.

The Election Model does not use historic econometric time-series data.
Interest rates, employment rates, commodity prices, consumer confidence are important factors.
But don’t expect political pundits to quantify the fraud factor in their regression models.

http://www.douglas-hibbs.com/Election2008/2008 Election.mht

Douglas Hibbs

My chart uses families, whereas the one Alex links to uses households. Households are in principle a better unit to use, but the Census Bureau data for them only begin in 1967, so it’s impossible to see the contrast between the early post-WW2 decades and the period since the mid-1970s. In any event, median household income too has increased far less rapidly than per capita DPI since the mid-70s.

Lane

It can’t just be a matter of scale. The time series for median income on this page is equal to 2 at some point in the early 1970s and also at some point in the early 1990s (as well as at other times). The graph over at wikipedia is strictly larger at any point during the 90s than it ever was during the 70s.

Perhaps the difference occurs because “household income” is not the same thing as “family income?”

It is a matter of scale.
There is no contradiction.

Tapen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Household_income_65_to_05.png

shows real median household income steadily increasing, in contrast to your last image which shows it to be stagnating. What is the source of the disparity?