Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by raincole 204 days ago
When FiveThirtyEight claimed Harris has 50-in-100 chance, it didn't mean that she'd likely to get 50% of the general vote. It had already taken electoral college into account.

> if Trump had won every single state by a single vote...

Yeah sure but in the reality we live in, Trump didn't win the swing states by just one single vote.

1 comments

"x/100 chance of y winning" for a single event just doesn't really have much meaning or value. if it predicted a 99/100 chance of a Harris victory, Trump winning is still compatible with that model. and despite the presumed urge to say it was inaccurate, it in fact could have been exactly right, but simply that the rare outcome happened. if it instead was predicting a vote share of 99% to 1%, then yeah you could consider that a poor model