by Stephen Fisher.

This question can be addressed from various angles and at different levels. I will start with the basic features of the result, then discuss the patterns of change since 2012, all before trying to address the bewilderment of many who find it hard to understand how anyone could vote for him.

Trump won the presidency by holding on to states that Romney won and winning some states that Obama previously won, including Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He did this by a combination of a national vote swing of around 1.5 points since 2012, plus above average swings in some key battleground states, such as Pennsylvania 3 points, Michigan 5 points and Iowa 10 points.*

At the same time, Trump lost the national popular vote but won the presidency by narrowly winning Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida with leads of less that 1.5 points each. So, had the swing to Trump in these states been smaller by just 1 point then Hilary Clinton would have won outright.  This was a close election. Continue reading Why was Trump elected? →

By Stephen Fisher

The majority of forecasts point to Hilary Clinton winning tomorrow’s US presidential election. Several of the poll, market and expert forecasts with probabilities for who will win are helpfully summarised by the New York Times here.  The polls-based predictions are all, apart from one, pretty confident that Clinton will win. At the time of writing, Drew Linzer’s model at Daily Kos puts the probability of a Clinton win at 87%, HuffPost has 98% and Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium estimate is as high as 99%. The New York Times’ own model is slightly less confident, on 84%. The exception is Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight model which puts Clinton’s chances at just 67%.

The lower probability for Clinton in the FiveThirtyEight model is partly (by comparison with most but not all models) due to 538 having a smaller estimate of her likely lead in votes. By comparison with HuffPost, for instance, this is because FiveThirtyEight put more weight on more recent polls that haven’t been so great for Clinton in wake of the FBI announcement last week of further investigations into her emails.

But the discrepancy is mostly due to the FiveThirtyEight model allowing for more uncertainty. So 538 have a higher probability of a Clinton landslide than other models as well as a higher probability of a triumphant Trump. Continue reading What to make of the US election forecasts? →