Expert pollster Nate Silver told ABC News that Hillary Clinton is only one state away from losing the election. Clinton is not in a “terribly safe position.”
Silver cited the odds of Hillary winning the election at 2:1. She has about 270 electoral votes now, but that means that if she loses one state that had been counted in her column, then she loses the election.
Some, like The Huffington Post, try to bust Silver’s chops and have in their own polls predicted a 98 percent chance of Hillary winning, but Silver uses a technique called trend line adjustment to adjust each poll’s results in light of each poll’s changes over time. Watch his segment here:
.@NateSilver538 calls Hillary Clinton a 2:1 favorite, but it's "not a terribly safe position." #thisweek https://t.co/R48KDnqaOE
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 6, 2016
It’s a technique that factors in a lot of uncertainty into the results and he calls for a very cautious approach to the numbers. He said the following:
Numbers are not magically correct because they are numbers – they can be incomplete or wrong.
But The Huffington Post, in all their left-wing smugness characterized Silver’s adjustments to the polls by categorizing them as “merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical thinking.”
In other words, they accuse Silvers of “cooking the books.” Silver counters by with a very witty tweet:
When you go low, I go high 80% of the time, and knee you in the balls the other 20% of the time.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
The truth of the matter is that the polls can’t account for everything. They are good tools, but to rely on them too much for predicting the outcome is like following GPS directions blindly and driving into a lake when you saw that you should have gone straight.
Trump may indeed be right when he challenges the veracity of all those left-leaning polls that spell doom-and-gloom for him.
h/t: The Blaze