23 weeks ago we started tracking Intrade on a weekly basis as our measure of how the US Election was playing out where at the time the probability for a Democrat victory was running at 62% with 293 projected Electoral College votes for Obama. Today we come to our final Intrade where the headline market gives an 88.5% probability of victory, our State market simulations have now climbed to a 99.977% win probability and the projected Electoral College votes are sitting around the 353 mark.

To start with will have a squiz at the daily trackers:

Obama has started to come of his high 1 to 2 weeks ago, consolidating around the 350/360 EV mark. The simulation probabilities have continued to run toward the Dems as the state probabilities have polarised out of the 30/70% threshold of contestability, while the Intrade headline Party markets have started to ease off as the probability approaches 90% (although over the next few days that will certainly change as the headline Party markets start closing in on 100% come Election day).

If we look at the Democrat win probabilities by State and how they’ve changed over the past week we get:

Montana, West Virginia, Indiana and Missouri moved strongly Republican over the last seven days as the strong Democrat polling results of a few weeks ago have failed to be repeated. Interestingly North Dakota moved towards the Republicans and currently sits on 29% for the Dems – even though the Pollster.com LOESS regression polling trend line has Obama leading McCain by a few points in the State.

Over the next two days, massive amounts of polling will be released — so expect to see some movement on Intrade if ND, MO, WV, IN or GA start looking good for the Dems.

Our simulations have tightened up so far that there isn’t much potential movement left barring some massive change in market sentiment:

If we focus on just the EV allocations of these sims we see the mean, median and mode all coalescing around the 350 mark.

To sum it all up, even though some states have moved back quite strongly toward the Republicans over the last week, dragging down the projected number of Democrat Electoral College votes in the process — the probability of the Democrats taking the Whitehouse has slightly increased as the time left for McCain to find a game changer has all but run out.