Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Not Too Tight, Please

If Nate Silver and his models are making you nervous about the possibility of waking up a week from today and seeing the smoldering ruins around you, there are other sites that can offer more insight and perspective, if not 100% reassurance that all is not lost.

Sam Wang and his group at the Princeton Election Consortium have been consistent with their predictions and still hold out Hillary Clinton as the winner with a 98% probability even as the race tightens.  This is from Monday:

Hillary Clinton’s advantage over Donald Trump has eroded somewhat since our last review of electoral forecasts on October 26th. Much of the change has been around forecasters moving states to toss-up that they had previously characterized as leaning toward Clinton.

Several forecasters followed this reclassification with Florida as it has tightened considerably in the polls. Trump has led in two of the last four polls there and only trailing by one in the other two. With its 29 electoral votes, the Sunshine State is pretty close to a must-win for the Republican nominee.

There are a lot of nuggets of numbers and graphs, and unlike FiveThirtyEight, they’re not interspersed with predictions about college football since PEC is not owned by ESPN (and Princeton hasn’t been a football powerhouse since my dad was there in the late 1940’s).  That’s not to disparage FiveThirtyEight, but just as they’re an aggregate of polls and weighted a certain way, so the the PEC.  And this morning I like this map better:

pec-map-11-02-16There is also the Upshot at the New York Times.

The Upshot’s elections model suggests that Hillary Clinton is favored to win the presidency, based on the latest state and national polls. A victory by Mr. Trump remains possible: Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a 35-yard field goal.

(What is it with pollsters and football?)  The only problem with the Upshot is that it’s behind a paywall.

I have always thought this would be a tight race down to the finish.  I would rather it was not, but let’s not kid ourselves; the right-wing noise machine was not going to let up even if it meant supporting a misogynistic racist with delusions of tacky grandeur as their one and only.  But I don’t want it to be too tight.  Let’s get Hillary Clinton over the finish line with at least 300 electoral votes, okay?

3 barks and woofs on “Not Too Tight, Please

  1. The KKK just endorsed Trump. Good for him. It took the campaign staff a couple of days to say that the values of the KKK aren’t in line with The Donald’s. Ah . . . really?

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