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Julia Azari over at Nate Silver's site says pretty much the same thing I said about how we ain't getting rid of the Electoral College, only she said it a lot better and with more information.


And I'd like to say a few words on behalf of Nate Silver, who's getting trashed a lot as a pollster who got the election "wrong." First thing: Nate Silver is not a pollster. He polls no one. He takes the polls that others compile, analyzes their accuracy and methodology and weights them accordingly to create an intelligent determination of what the polls say. And usually, all this works.

Silver said for a long time that Hillary had an 80+% chance of winning and there's no reason to believe he or the polls were wrong at that point. As we got closer to Election Day, he raised Trump's chances and lowered hers, prompting many to suggest he was letting some personal opinion override what the computer models indicated. I don't think he did. I think his models picked up on a late-breaking shift.

At the dawn of Election Day, I believe his projection stood at a 71% chance of Hillary winning, which was lower than most other poll analysts working with mostly the same data. That's not a prediction she'd get 71% of the vote and the 30-or-so% chance Trump had does not translate to Hillary winning. People do beat the odds all the time.

Years ago, I auditioned (mainly for fun) to be a TV weatherman. An experienced TV weatherman told me he had an 80% rule, If he said that if he said there was a 70% chance of rain and it didn't rain, his viewers would understand. A 30% chance of no rain is not the same thing as saying it's not going to rain. But if he said there was an 80% chance of rain and then it didn't rain, people would call him and yell, "You said it was going to rain!"

Oddly enough, it didn't work the opposite way. If he said there was a 20% chance of rain and then it rained, no one complained he'd said it would not rain. And Nate Silver did not say Trump could not win.


Lastly, getting back to the Electoral College for a moment, Mark Joseph Stern agrees it will not be abolished but explains about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is kind of a workaround for this. I can't tell you why but I don't like the idea.