FiveThirtyEight now showing a presidential forecast

[WhyteRain]

Nate is always the best. My prediction map is based on his forecasts (tossup=within 67%, lean=67-90%, strong=over 90%).



Oregon and Minnesota are a tad surprising to me (I'd switch them off), but that's probably a fluke.

What's going on in Michigan and New Jersey?  My prediction (made ~7 month ago for Obama vs. generic GOP opponent) has Obama winning less than 200 EV, but even I show him winning MI and NJ.  I don't live near MI or NJ, so I hope someone can explain why they are just "leans".

[Modify:]  I notice that if Obama loses all the toss-ups here, then he gets the Kerry-2004-plus-New-Mexico total.  Which will be less than 270 total.

[Brittain33]

Obama wins at least one state he failed to carry in 2008 10.0%
Obama wins Montana 17%

OK, Nate.

Here's how that works. Obama having a 17% chance of winning Montana means that if you run 100 simulations, he'll win Montana significantly fewer than 17 times. Maybe single digits. And that leads to the 10% number.

[Antonio the Sixth]

MI and NJ are both almost safe States, but stood barely below the 90% threshold by the time I made the prediction. On June 8, instead, they were both over 90%.

[pbrower2a]

Oregon being less solid for Obama in his predictions than most people think is mostly from the SurveyUSA poll that showed Obama up by 4. Nate Silver's model is really good, but in this case it's a garbage in, garbage out scenario. Oregon will correct itself once we get more polls there to dilute and bury the outlier.

Compared to the U.S. as a whole, Oregon was more severely impacted by the Great Recession.  Even if there were no polling data from Oregon, I'd expect Oregon to be only +7 or +8 Obama.  That May poll is a bit of an outlier, but it's no more so than SUSA's March poll that had Obama at +11.  Obama is an unlikely Romney pickup, but not an impossible one, especially if the economy takes a turn for the worse between now and November.

Oregon relies heavily on the timber industry, and when housing construction goes in the tank, then so does timber.   

[Brittain33]

If my statistics is wrong here, I hope someone calls me out. I'm doubting it now

Obama wins at least one state he failed to carry in 2008 10.0%
Obama wins Montana 17%

OK, Nate.

Here's how that works. Obama having a 17% chance of winning Montana means that if you run 100 simulations, he'll win Montana significantly fewer than 17 times. Maybe single digits. And that leads to the 10% number.

[minionofmidas]

It ought to mean he wins it 17 times. And obviously these 17 runs are only a subset of the total runs featuring Obama win at least one state he didn't previously (cough Missouri?), hence that figure needs to be at least 17% as well. So it probably was some kind of error.

[ilikeverin]

If my statistics is wrong here, I hope someone calls me out. I'm doubting it now

Obama wins at least one state he failed to carry in 2008 10.0%
Obama wins Montana 17%

OK, Nate.

Here's how that works. Obama having a 17% chance of winning Montana means that if you run 100 simulations, he'll win Montana significantly fewer than 17 times. Maybe single digits. And that leads to the 10% number.

Yeah, that makes no sense.  It was a mistake and he fixed it.

[Linus Van Pelt]

If my statistics is wrong here, I hope someone calls me out. I'm doubting it now

Obama wins at least one state he failed to carry in 2008 10.0%
Obama wins Montana 17%

OK, Nate.

Here's how that works. Obama having a 17% chance of winning Montana means that if you run 100 simulations, he'll win Montana significantly fewer than 17 times. Maybe single digits. And that leads to the 10% number.

Yes, it's wrong. It violates the third Kolmogorov axiom for an event to have lower probability than a more specific event that is a subset of it.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on since the actual calculations don't seem to be on the linked website, but if Alcon says it's been changed, it was probably just an editing error.

[Linus Van Pelt]

LOL, sorry for the pile-on. Should focus on the red message more

[Brittain33]

I specifically invited the pile-on, so it's all good.