Well, as I suspected, you don't really understand Silver's model, nor probabilities in general. That 60/40 (technically, it's 60.9/39.1 right now) is the output of the model for the election outcome taking everything into account. Not just the current state and national polls, but the convention bounces, the economy, the polls concerning consumer confidence and Presidential approval, as well as the time remaining for new information to arise. It also tries to take into account the probability of a systematic bias in the polls one way or another. So, in theory, everything is in those numbers. I'm not saying the model is right, but I think it's more likely to be right than any other numbers that people have come up with, especially "feelings" that you pull out of your butt. In the short run, the probabilities are equally likely to go in Hillary's favor as not. In the long run, the probabilities are more likely to go in Hillary's favor by approximately 60% to 40%. But none of that matters. If you go to sleep and wake up on Nov. 9, 3 out of 5 times Hillary will be the President elect, and 2 out of 5 times, Trump will be.
Hilited: Ya think? Or you just need to get in some misguided passive-aggressive not-terribly-clever sophistry? I'm amazed at the schoolyard debate tactics people keep employing in spite of getting caught out on them, repeatedly.
A large component of Silver's model is polls. Yes, he rubs them up against statistics on voting patterns and demographics, but you can't statistic your way away from what the voters are saying. Yes, you adjust for real world results, but if a district is polling 83% Trump, it'd be stupid to ignore it because it went 76% Obama in the last election. Nate Silver is not a conjurer. His accuracy is based on tracking polls AND applying historical data. As the polls shift, so will his projections.
But don't trust me on this. Come back to this thread in six weeks and see what's happening with the numbers and his projections. His probabilities over time are based on "if the voter sentiment continues AND you offset that against reliable historical data and demographics, HERE'S what happens. I'd be willing to bet that the numbers are quite different. He ain't a soothsayer. He's putting in data.
Well, I wonder if you felt dirty while millions of your fellow liberals and quite a few high profile members of the Democratic Party, including the Senate Majority Leader, were rooting the Iraq War to go bad and for more US troops and Iraqi civilians to die. I know I was disgusted by that, but somehow I'm sure you rationalized that behavior in your own mind.
Tu quoque. Ad hom. Incorrect. Faulty data leading to faulty conclusion. That you believe the right wing spin on the success of the surge does not make it so. The surge was a failure. Reid and others could see that it was going to fail. Was his criticism of the surge political? Yeah, of course, political parties are "partisan"... that's a given. Was he therefore hoping for failure and thus the death of American troops, Iraqi troops, civilians? What a scurrilous accusation.
Regardless, I don't think it would take a devastating terrorist attack for Trump to win. All it would take is for Trump to show improved discipline (which we actually saw in his convention speech), or perhaps the presence of a larger than expected "Bradley effect" (which I believe is at work). The moribund economy (growing at about 1% in 2016 so far) might also sink in to the collective consciousness, despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to avoid mentioning the topic.
It would take a major terrorist attack on American soil or against a US plane or facility. And I do mean "major". Look at the non-bump from the events in Europe, recently. America Firsters don't give a rat's ass about the French or Germans and a suicide bomber could blow up a marketplace in Basrah, Kabul, Karachi, Mumbai, Tunis, etc... every hour on the hour, and it wouldn't mean a thing. Nope.... major terrorist attack on US soil, against a US asset, or our fifty-first state, Israel. And the latter would have to be "super major", like a dirty bomb. All of this is IMHO, of course, but I think it's pretty evident from the patterns of the past few months.
And I hook on "major" because it has to be so big as to outrage people to the point where they can't think straight. As long as they can reason, enough will still come to the obvious conclusion that Trump has no idea how he plans to deal with this and will desperately seeking his own Cheney, probably Frightening Flynn.
As far as terrorism is concerned, I'm rooting for the FBI to uncover a huge plot to perpetrate a terrorist attack in the US and boast about it publicly. That would highlight the threat, while allowing people to remain rational about how to deal with that threat. Also, it would be nice to have such an anti-terrorism success, since I think it is quite likely that there are terrorist sympathizers plotting bad things in this country as we speak.
Which FBI would that be? The one that Efrem Zimbalist headed up? 'Cuz I seem to recall you not believing them recently in spite of their avowals. And the FBI/whomever have uncovered plots in the last few years. Trump's still losing.
