2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumPrinceton Election Consortium: 85% chance of Hillary win; most likely EV 330:208
Sam Wang and his co-workers were slightly more accurate in 2012 than Nate Silver (I think they got the Senate races better). Here's his current calculation:
As we have done since 2004, we are taking a polls-only approach to give a daily snapshot of the race as well as a November prediction. This approach has an effective precision of a few tenths of a percentage point of public opinion, and performs very well as both a tracker and a forecast. Currently, the probability of a Hillary Clinton victory in November is 85 percent, based on polls alone.
...
A key parameter in PECs calculation is the Meta-Margin. This is the amount by which the two-candidate margin in state polls would have to change in order to create a perfect electoral tie. For example, today the Meta-Margin is Clinton +3.86%. This means that Donald Trumps election odds would be perfectly even if he picked up a net of about 3.9 percentage points among currently-undecided voters or if about 1.9 percentage points of Clinton supporters switched sides..
...
The red zone is a strike zone showing the 68% confidence interval of probable outcomes. The yellow zone is a watch zone that shows a combination of the 95% random-movement confidence interval and the 95% gray-zone confidence interval. The November outcome is nearly certain to be within this range.
http://election.princeton.edu/2016/06/30/the-2016-presidential-meta-analysis/#more-16133
OKNancy
(41,832 posts)I like reading good news, so thanks for posting m_v
texstad79
(115 posts)However, Trump is a much weaker candidate than Romney. IMHO, the margin will be much better for HRC.
sheshe2
(83,787 posts)Doctor Jack
(3,072 posts)And according to some lingering anti-clinton folks here, its proof that Clinton has completely collapsed suddenly...for seemingly no reason. Now you might be saying "but every other poll shows her up by 6-10 points and she is well ahead in all of the averages", however, need I remind you that 1 right-wing poll from a company that is known for being completely inaccurate says otherwise so everyone pack it up. Go home, the election is over.