AnalysisConsulting

In the US, the electoral college drives the presidential election. A candidate will win an election if they obtain more than half of the electoral votes (EV), regardless of the popular vote. For the fifth time in the history of this country, the candidate who won the presidential election, did not win the popular vote. These presidents are John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000), and most recently Donald Trump (2016)

Last week we had the presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The most surprising thing about the outcome is that the major poll-based forecast models were wrong. They all gave Clinton a greater than 71% chance of winning. To be fair, none of these models gave Trump a 0% chance of becoming president. And this is key, because it meant that Trump ALWAYS had a chance of succeeding; the same way anyone can beat a casino game even when the odds are unfavo

Recently I was reading an interesting article by Nate Silver. In it there is a chart that compares the Post-debate “instant” poll, net margin (horizontal axis) versus the Gain or loss in horse-race poll after debate (vertical axis). The data comes from CNN and Gallup polls of presidential debates since 1984. A copy of the chart is observed below. What caught my attention is that the chart is “rotationally invariant”. In other words, the chart looks the same when it is rotated