[FrojoS]

I think it’s a confusion between the likelihood of winning, no matter by how many votes, and the predicted percentage of votes per candidate. The latter is more commonly presented to readers from polls. So it’s not too surprising if it gets mixed up with the former, which is used by Nate et al and uses also percent as the unit.

Say a national poll predicts 55% of votes for Clinton, 40% for Trump. Whereas 538 predicts 70% chance of winning for Clinton and 30% for Trump. It’s easy to confuse the two and think the second prediction is much better for Clinton when it might be much worse.