The election has reached its final days, and people are ready to cast their votes and see who our next president will be.
There are plenty of supporters of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton who believe there’s no way the other candidate will win. But as many more polls showed Clinton ahead, more of those calls have been directed at Trump.
In fact, FiveThirtyEight, a news site that compiles data on politics, economics and sports, has Trump’s current chances of winning the election at 33 percent. Those are the highest odds in his favor since September; his low point was on Oct. 17 with only a 12 percent chance of beating Clinton.
But for those who still think a Clinton victory is a sure thing, not so fast. FiveThirtyEight had a prediction on the Chicago Cubs’ path to victory in the World Series, and it was significantly worse than Trump’s chances.
After Chicago lost game four to Cleveland, who then led the series 3-1, FiveThirtyEight gave the Cubs only a 15 percent chance of winning the World Series. Given that the Cubs won the Series Wednesday night, now people are using that model to point to the possibility of a Trump win.
Congratulations to @Cubs players, fans and the Ricketts family. Prepare for a second miracle on Tuesday. #winning https://t.co/Zdofu3bX4g
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 3, 2016
FiveThirtyEight rated the Cubs chances at 15% a few days ago. Trump has risen from 18% to 32% in about that time. You better vote!!
— Ryan C. Gordon (@icculus) November 3, 2016
Even Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, made a joke about the numbers.
CUBS
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 3, 2016
CABS
CRABS
CRAMS
CRAMP
TRAMP
TRUMP
And, of course, Trump’s people weren’t the only ones linking their hoped-for victory to the Cubs’ win.
They did it! 108 years later and the drought is finally over. Way to make history, @Cubs. #FlyTheW -H
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 3, 2016
FiveThirtyEight and Silver were lauded for their predictions of the 2012 election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Silver correctly called the percentages of votes in 48 out of 50 states within his margin of error, giving him a 96 percent success rate. Given that he assigned a 95 percent success rate to his predictions, the model was indisputably impressive.
But Silver damaged his reputation in the primaries this year when he gave Trump only a 2 percent chance of winning the Republican nomination. In May, Silver admitted to the “big mistake” and said he “acted like a pundit” and ignored numbers in favor of subjective odds about Trump, which resulted in the odds being lower than they should have been. Silver has since relied on polls and numbers for the general election.
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