Free Republic

Here’s the Electoral College map we’re going to end up with, assuming that every uncalled state goes to the candidate leading in the vote count there as of 4 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. There’s a sea of red for President-elect Donald Trump. He earned 306 electoral votes and became the first Republican since 1988 to win Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

According to FiveThirtyEight's Election Forecast, Trump entered October with a 32.7 percent chance of winning the 2016 election. But after just two weeks, Trump now stands at a dismal 13.4 percent chance of victory according to polls and only 11.2 percent chance if the election were held today, showing that perhaps even The Donald isn't immune to such a mounting list of controversies.

Clinton chance of winning: 51.8% Trump chance of winning: 48.2%

Donald Trump has had a good run of numbers lately. While his victory in New York this week was expected, he got 60 percent of the vote, more than the roughly 55 percent projected by the polls. He appears headed for victories in Maryland and Pennsylvania, which vote on Tuesday. He’s gained ground in California and is narrowly ahead of Ted Cruz in the first public polls of Indiana. He’s added about 2 percentage points over the past two weeks in our national polling average. But with Trump’s path to 1,237 delegates on such a knife’s edge, every percentage point...

It could all come down to 53 micro-primaries in California. Three weeks ago, when we last took a detailed look at Donald Trump’s quest to win 1,237 delegates, his path looked rocky but endurable. The panel of eight experts FiveThirtyEight assembled projected Trump to wind up with 1,208 by the time California and four other states finished counting their votes on June 7, a number that would leave him tantalizingly close to clinching the Republican presidential nomination — probably close enough that he’d be able to get over the hump by persuading some uncommitted delegates to come his way before...

Donald Trump has 39 percent of the vote in our Pennsylvania polling average, 37 percent in California, and 39 percent in Maryland. If this were February or early March, that would leave him without much to worry about. Even if Trump picked up zero undecided voters, he’d be pretty much guaranteed a win with the rest of the vote divided between a half-dozen opponents. But those days are over. In Wisconsin on Tuesday, Trump had 35 percent of the vote — the same share that allowed him to win New Hampshire easily in February, and a larger percentage than he...

Sanders beats Clinton in Michigan Dem primary, Fox News projects Published March 08, 2016 Fox News projects that Bernie Sanders will beat Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic primary, marking a huge upset victory for the Vermont senator. This is the ninth and largest state that Sanders has won so far in the Democratic presidential campaign.

Bernie Sanders pulled off his biggest win of the Democratic presidential race on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary on a night which also confirmed strong anti-establishment support for Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination. In an industrial state hit hard by the decline of manufacturing, the Vermont senator’s consistent opposition to free trade deals appears to have been a decisive factor, but he also showed signs of weakening Clinton’s dominance among African American voters. The shock victory – by a margin of around 3 percentage points when his win was first projected by Associated...

According to our final polls-plus forecast, Hillary Clinton had a greater than 99% chance of winning the Michigan primary. ---FiveThirtyEight, 3:43 PM EST, March 8, 2016. Oops! Or rather, a massive OOPS!!! The FiveThirtyEight blog is considered to be the gold (or rather silver since its founder is Nate Silver) standard in election predictions. So when it is so wildly off the mark as happened last night as Bernie Sanders pulled off an astounding primary victory upset in Michigan over Hillary Clinton, it is definitely quite notable. So how to excuse this error? Actually, credit must go to 538 analyst Harry Enten who...

WNYC's "On The Media" has a great series called the "Breaking News Consumer's Handbook," and as part of our ongoing partnership with them, we put together a handy list of rules for interpreting election polls. Listen to the whole episode, or just to my dulcet tones: But I also wanted to add a few notes on each rule. Here we go: 1. Wait. Shrug off polls until just before primaries, or until after the conventions for the general election. Even within a week of a primary election, the polls are often inaccurate. The polls more than a month out are,...

Three days after the terrorist attack in which 14 people were killed at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, a crowd of 1,500 Republican faithful streamed into the sunny lobby of Cedar Rapids' U.S. Cellular Center, passed through metal detectors, and took their seats for a four-hour oratory marathon by four presidential candidates, ostensibly focused on economic issues. But people's minds seemed elsewhere -- flags, as you drove through the city, waved at half-staff, and murmurs about homegrown terror were amplifying quickly. He wasn't in attendance that day in Iowa, and it would be two more days before he...

Liberal Media darling and alleged prediction guru Nate Silver says that everyone in the media should just calm down and stop "freaking out" about Donald Trump's amazing poll numbers. He insists that almost no voters have actually made up their mind yet and that there is still only a minuscule chance of Trump stealing the GOP nomination and changing our politics forever (not to mention also virtually insuring the election of Hillary Clinton). Silver is mostly wrong about Trump's chances of winning the nomination, but more importantly he discounts the very real impact that Trump will have on the ultimate...

Lately, pundits and punters seem bullish on Donald Trump, whose chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination recently inched above 20 percent for the first time at the betting market Betfair. Perhaps the conventional wisdom assumes that the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris will play into Trump’s hands, or that Republicans really might be in disarray. If so, I can see where the case for Trump is coming from, although I’d still say a 20 percent chance is substantially too high. Quite often, however, the Trump’s-really-got-a-chance! case is rooted almost entirely in polls. If nothing Trump has said...

Nate Silver, editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, the dream site for statistics nerds, crystallized the bewilderment of the analyst class in trying to process the ongoing triumph of Donald Trump. "About 25 percent of Americans identify as Republican. Donald Trump's getting about 25 percent of that 25 percent in the polls. Why is this impressive to people?" Silver tweeted, drawing more than 1,000 retweets and likes apiece. The answer, of course, is twofold. First, that fourth-of-a-fourth is exactly the sort that often can wield such outsized influence in American presidential primary politics. Second, and even more to the point, is...

In case you didn’t remember (three of my colleagues looked stricken when this topic came up), it’s Mother’s Day this Sunday. Here are nine reasons, courtesy of the latest American Time Use Survey, why you should buy your mom a present: 1.Your mom probably helped you out with your homework (women spend an average of 6.2 minutes a day doing homework with children in their households. Men spend less than four minutes); 2. It was probably your mom who had to listen to your teachers say how bad your homework was (women spend three times as much time per day...

A New York Times columnist has expressed substantially more negative sentiments about FiveThirtyEight since it left The New York Times, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. The columnist, Paul Krugman, who writes about economics and politics for The Times, has referred to FiveThirtyEight or editor-in-chief Nate Silver 33 times on his blog. FiveThirtyEight classified each reference based on whether it expressed a favorable, unfavorable or neutral sentiment toward FiveThirtyEight. …

The top forecaster in American politics has announced he is leaving the nation's most prestigious newspaper for a new home with the world's premier sportscaster. Nate Silver is joining ESPN from the New York Times after a stunning three-year run in which he coolly nailed the biggest election calls, attracted an enormous readership and silenced pundits whose mouths were previously thought to be un-stanchable. At ESPN, Silver will serve as editor-in-chief of a new site, built by him, to apply statistical analysis to sports and a broad range of other fields. The new site will retain the name FiveThirtyEight, in...

Sean, I was in New Orleans a few years ago and passed a small group of demonstrators wielding signs in support of the government housing authority. The message, in effect, was "Housing is a fundamental right and should be free". Basically, "where's my free house?" It occured to me that if everyone did that, nobody would have a house. 100% of American success, the things you and I take for granted such as sitting at our laptops in a climate-controlled setting arguing politics, likely only a few minutes away from stores where you can buy anything and everything, in an...