2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumFiveThirtyEight: "For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased"
NY Times:Fridays 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.
Although the fact that Mr. Obama held the lead in so many polls is partly coincidental there werent any polls of North Carolina on Friday, for instance, which is Mr. Romneys strongest battleground state they nevertheless represent powerful evidence against the idea that the race is a tossup. A tossup race isnt likely to produce 19 leads for one candidate and one for the other any more than a fair coin is likely to come up heads 19 times and tails just once in 20 tosses. (The probability of a fair coin doing so is about 1 chance in 50,000.)
abumbyanyothername
(2,711 posts)Clearly wrong. President Obama is now better than a 5 in 6 favorite to win the EC, according to the FiveThrityEight forecast.
83.7% = 5.14 to 1 = 5.14 in 6.
Liberal_Stalwart71
(20,450 posts)abumbyanyothername
(2,711 posts)Nate's "brand" is being a math geek. You would think that he could get this one right.
Liberal_Stalwart71
(20,450 posts)Jeff In Milwaukee
(13,992 posts)This come to just a titch below 80%. It was 4:1 just two days ago.
The consensus appears to be that Obama is padding his lead coming down the stretch.
abumbyanyothername
(2,711 posts)He is citing his model.
MADem
(135,425 posts)abumbyanyothername
(2,711 posts)to me "better than 4 in 5" means greater than 4 in 5 but less than the next whole number odds. Expressing the odds in integer to integer implies that the odds are closest to those to integers.
Here they are not. The odds actually exceed the next full step up to the next higher integers.
MADem
(135,425 posts)Godhumor
(6,437 posts)And 4 out of 5 is the kind of fraction that is easy for people to grasp.
abumbyanyothername
(2,711 posts)TexasCPA
(527 posts)If you aggregate the state polls, Obama is out of the MOE is enough states to get above 270. He only losses if the statisticians have made wrong assumptions in who will be voting.