Not to put too fine a point on it, but I bet all of my money he didn’t predict Trump would win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by millions. That article gives no hint he even knows it happened. Meanwhile, Five Thirty-Eight supposedly based most of the probability mass they assigned to Trump winning on a technical EC victory, and they said he had one chance in four (one in three earlier).
The fact that a 25% chance can happen with potentially devastating consequences is roughly why Trump the outsider might blow up America, though I’d give that no more than a 13% chance.
OK, they gave him a greater chance than I thought of winning the popular vote. I can’t tell if that applies to the polls-plus model which they actually seemed to believe, but that’s not the point. The point is, they had a model with a lot of uncertainty based on recognizing the world is complicated, they explicitly assigned a disturbing probability to the actual outcome, and they praised Trump’s state/Electoral College strategy for that reason.
538′s models are predictions of how the polls will change with time, so the closer to the election, the less difference there is between them, negligible in the final prediction. But if you want to see, look here. It shows predictions on the right. Near the bottom is “Trump wins popular vote.” On the left, you can choose between the three models and see that it doesn’t make a difference.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I bet all of my money he didn’t predict Trump would win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by millions. That article gives no hint he even knows it happened. Meanwhile, Five Thirty-Eight supposedly based most of the probability mass they assigned to Trump winning on a technical EC victory, and they said he had one chance in four (one in three earlier).
The fact that a 25% chance can happen with potentially devastating consequences is roughly why Trump the outsider might blow up America, though I’d give that no more than a 13% chance.
538 put Trump winning popular vote at 20%. They put Trump winning EC while losing popular at 10%.
OK, they gave him a greater chance than I thought of winning the popular vote. I can’t tell if that applies to the polls-plus model which they actually seemed to believe, but that’s not the point. The point is, they had a model with a lot of uncertainty based on recognizing the world is complicated, they explicitly assigned a disturbing probability to the actual outcome, and they praised Trump’s state/Electoral College strategy for that reason.
538′s models are predictions of how the polls will change with time, so the closer to the election, the less difference there is between them, negligible in the final prediction. But if you want to see, look here. It shows predictions on the right. Near the bottom is “Trump wins popular vote.” On the left, you can choose between the three models and see that it doesn’t make a difference.