Electoral vote

Who will win the electoral vote on Tuesday, November 8th? It is not what you say, but how you say it. For several days now, I've been told by some how totally wrong I am in my various analyses of the electoral map. Half the naysayers say "But but FiveThirtyEight says this, so you are wrong" and the other half say "No, no, Sam Wang at Princeton says that, so you are wrong!" But all along, we've all three been saying something very similar. The difference in how we say it is, Sam Wang says something like "I'll eat my shorts if Clinton doesn't win" and I say "I think Clinton will win, but…

A couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find a pundit or poll maven who saw a Trump victory as a possibility. I made the audacious claim at the time that this was incorrect, and I've been taking heat from it since then. Much of this widespread misunderstanding is ironically caused by the good work of the folks at FiveThirtyEight and their imitators such as the New York Times, who have been publishing probability statements about the outcome. If I know for near certain that Mary is going to beat Joe in an election, then I can say something like this: Probability of winning Mary: 97% Joe…