Let's not get over confident - the latest Nate Silver article
I would recommend an article by Nate Silver, noted election statistician:
Election Update: There Are 4 Ways This Election Can End — And 3 Involve Clinton Winning
In this article Nate reminds us that even with a 87% chance of winning, not all signs point a Hillary blow out. Silver reminds us that that a candidate with 87% chance wining means that she should win 6 out of 7 times and that a candidate like Trump should win once out of every 7 Presidential elections.
The charts below — which are based on 20,000 simulations from our model as of Friday afternoon2 — attempt to explain this by laying out four broad scenarios:
A Trump win, including cases where he loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College.
A narrow Clinton win, wherein she wins the Electoral College, but wins the popular vote by 3 percentage points or less. (Or wins the Electoral College and loses the popular vote.)
A Clinton win in the “Obama zone,” wherein she wins the popular vote by 4 to 7 percentage points — the margins by which President Obama won the elections in 2012 and 2008, respectively. Clinton is all but certain to win the Electoral College if she wins the popular vote by this amount.
Finally, a Clinton blowout, wherein she wins the popular vote by 8 points or more, which would almost certainly also yield a dominant performance in the Electoral College.
I wish I knew how to "copy and paste" the charts Silver provides (perhaps someone can do that on a reply), but these are the percentages Silver arrived at after running 20,000 simulations of the election (using a computer of course) using the results of state polls.
Based on the current polls only:
Trump win: 13%
Narrow Clinton win: 13%
Clinton win in the "Obama Zone": 31%
Clinton blowout: 43%
Based on current polls and trends of past elections "discounts Clinton’s lead slightly, expecting the race to tighten by a point or so".
Trump win: 16%
Narrow Clinton win: 17%
Clinton win in the "Obama Zone": 36%
Clinton blowout: 32%
The bottom line for me is that we can't get complacent. We must get out the vote and be sure to remember to vote ourselves, regardless of which state we live in. To have a real mandate for change Hillary needs not only to win the Electoral College, she needs to win the popular vote by a large margin as well. That means that a vote in California is as important as vote in Iowa.
= new reply since forum marked as read
(Right-click on the image and select "Copy image location", then use Ctrl-v to insert it in your OP = at least that's how you do it in Firefox. In this case there was a bit of garbage after the .png suffix in the image URL, so I deleted it, but it would only show up as a bit of text next to the image if you didn't bother doing that.)
