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That’s probably the popular vote numbers. The electoral college projections are a bit more frightening. Much of the mid-West is very much up for grabs right now. It’s very important to make sure that people get out and actually vote.
There are also downticket candidates in every state that need support, and many who need to be shown the door. Republican senators have vowed to ignore any and all supreme court nominees made by a President Clinton. Why should we retain any senator who vows to no not perform their duties? http://www.salon.com/2016/10/17/john-mccain-republicans-will-block-any-supreme-court-nominee-of-hillary-clinton/
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature and meaning of that “~15%” chance of a Turmp win.
You could interpret it as “if it were possible to run history over and over again, from now until November 9th, Trump would win about one in seven times”. Which would be pant-soiling, but I don’t think that’s quite correct. I think, if you could take a snapshot of every single voter’s heart, you could be very confident of the outcome.
I think the indecisive number just reflects the limits on how confident you can be based on such crude instruments. Like, the polls are absolutely saying Clinton will win, it’s just that polls have so many ways of being wrong. In some way, this interpretation is less alarming.
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Trump got a lot of ribbing last week for declaring that the polls are meaningless because he has a “secret majority”; while I don’t think that’s true, I do agree with him that a lot of his supporters aren’t the kind of person to tell a pollster that they’re voting Trump. Between the paranoid and the ashamed, I think a lot of “undecided” voters in the polls are Trump voters who’ll secretly enthusiastically support him.
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He cuts a fine figure…of an oval
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Trump sees himself as the Justin Trudeau in this story?
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And if tRump’s sons want to look manly, they should do their big game hunting naked and bare-handed, the way nature intended. Trophy hunting with a gun is cheating.
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I think if the gun were positioned next to the temporal region, for example, the gas given off by the blank and any wadding would still probably kill you or turn you into a vegetable!
The gas given off is probably in the region of at least 6 miles a second, knocking on a bit!
Jon Hexum was killed when he put a blank-loaded .44 to his head and pulled the trigger and the powerful shock-wave from the blank cartridge penetrated his skull sending bone fragments and wadding into his brain, which can be made of plastic, paper or wood and it killed him.
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As I was saying… 
"A 16 percent chance of a Trump presidency isn’t nothing — as we’ve pointed out before, it’s about the same as the chances of losing a “game” of Russian roulette. "
Not a great comparison. In 1948 there weren’t many polls — both in number of people doing them, and in how far from the election some of them stopped1 — and survey methods have changed dramatically since then. (Including some lessons learnt in the aftermath.)
A Trump victory is still possible, sure, but it would require a huge swing — one that would almost certainly be picked up in the polls, and which we’re not seeing at the moment.
1. All but one had stopped polling by mid-October, and one firm was so convinced that Dewey would win that they had stopped polling people in September.
Or, if you’d rather 538’s opinion on it:
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The old answers to having a multishot weapon were questionable at best. You can cover it in gold and pearls, but that lock-up looks horrible.
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I’m pretty sure this thing was exclusively meant to be a gift to some archduke or general, or maybe for ceremonial use. I doubt it’s ever been fired.
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It’s still in one piece, so it’s probably never been fired.
These pieces fascinate me as much as they scare me. A spanish “pepperbox” pistol, how many barrels will go off at the same time? Who knows?
The old “duck foot” pistols, WTF? Collateral damage much?
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I thought there were two really interesting comments in 538’s podcast today:
- One major reason that 538’s predictions give a much higher chance of a Trump victory than many other predictions do is due to uncertainty over how accurate the current polls are; that modern polling is traditionally really good, but they’re being conservative with their estimate of poll accuracy. (This isn’t new information; they’ve been saying this for a while, now)
- The new comment was that early votes seem to be roughly matching the polling data. That is, from what they’ve been hearing so far, it sounds like the polls aren’t wildly out of touch with the early voting that’s actually happened so far, which maybe lends more credence to the data from the polls.
Of course, they didn’t actually explain where the information about early voting was coming from, and on what basis they think it matches what the polls were predicting. Presumably it’s just polling of early voters? In which case, you’d sort of expect that any problems with polling of the general population (if there is any) would also be visible in polling of early voters, right? Of course the polls match the polls. xD
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The intended use of a gun is to kill something. The intended use of a duckfoot gun is to kill a crowd of something at close range. They were designed for prison guards and the like.
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In the top picture, it almost looks like it says “Dewey Defeats Trump”.
Thomas E. Dewey has been dead for 45 years, and I still think he’s more electable than Trump.
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Ah, me and my lack of understanding of why you’d ever have the need to fire into a crowd (presumably of other humans…). I guess the duckfoot is not for people who just can’t aim well at a single target.
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Also 538’s opinion:
So then: Democrats have nothing to worry about, right? Nope, we wouldn’t say that, either. The race could easily tighten further. And our forecast gives Trump better odds than most other models because it accounts for the possibility of a systemic polling error, a greater risk than people may assume. A 16 percent chance of a Trump presidency isn’t nothing — as we’ve pointed out before, it’s about the same as the chances of losing a “game” of Russian roulette. And 15 percent is about the same chance we gave the San Antonio Spurs of beating the Golden State Warriors last night — the Spurs won by 29 points.
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Update:
On today’s podcast they alluded to how they get early voting results: Yup, it’s polling. In the same call where pollsters normally ask people who they’ll be voting for, they also ask whether they’ve voted early, and if so, who they voted for.
So it seems to me that if there’s any sampling error going on in the polls, you’d expect to see precisely the same sampling error in the “early voting” poll results, seeing as both sets of results are derived from the same polling procedure.
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