Two Presidential election experts predict 2016 is not a easy call

predicting other things.

The weather:
'It's pouring rain. How will the weather be in a minute? Not an easy call.'

The Olympics:
The USA women's gymnastics team has won twelve medals. Ukraine has won two. Deciding which team will get more medals ... not an easy call.'

The trouble is there are none. The only quantitative approach to this one is via well designed polls. These precedent-based semi-quantitative analyses assume that the recent past is like the near future, but despite people pointing to folks like Reagan and GWB as exemplars, two governors of large states with decades of political experience behind them, running orthodox campaigns stocked with political professionals, are not ciphers for a barely coherent reality show human version of Triumph the Insult Dog and a campaign run by propagandists who speak only to their base with the help of moronic juvenile neophytes and the ground game of a badminton league.

...they'll give you an indication based on preferences and intent TODAY, but they're subject to change, and they still require the voter to actually show up on election day (hence GOTV efforts).

Polls, best compared against previous exemplars using the same methodology, certainly give us good information on probabilities at a point in time. Their predictive power is decent even by now and will only improve with proximity. We are staying within the variable we care about - voter preference - and not introducing extraneous independent variables which rarely have enough data to form a valid correlation (what is the n for economic direction or confidence, measured consistently, at the time of presidential elections exactly? 4? 5? That's just not enough) with the primary variable. Only polls can accommodate the reaction of people to unprecedented candidates, and we have both the major ones falling into that category this time albeit for different reasons. I'm not looking to polls to say "ah ok that means the popular vote will be X vs Y in November", I'm looking at them to say "Clinton is maintaining a strong lead in the popular vote, and more importantly in state by state EV count, and the public is not reacting as well as the R primary base did to Trump's barstool bully bluster. Things look good." Yes an Iranian dirty bomb could go off in DC in October. Yes Clinton could be videotaped taking a bribe from agents of Maduro. Yes, the least likely of the three, Trump could adopt Reagan-like genial charisma and keep it up until November. But every polling place could also be hit by a meteoroid overnight 11/7 too. We have to work with the relevant information we have, rather than doing some half-assed version of correlated.org on far less data.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

This is truly the most bizarre analysis I've ever read.



UCLA, we don't blame you for this nonsense. But, Bigdarryl, playing university names is a lot easier when truth is the goal. Here's the Princeton's Consortium's electoral map. Thanks for setting this answer up.



Below is their "safe" map which shows darkest colors for those states the candidates are estimated to have at least 95% chance of winning. The "safe" total is thus a minimum electoral estimate and it still puts Hillary at a minimum 271.

-white

what can happen in three months. If the election were today, Hillary would win easily by the polls of registered voters.

But most people have only started paying attention, and over 2 months gives us more chance to whittle away at downballot races.

I'm bored with it already. Heck even I was humored by trump nonsense during the primary at first but that got old quick. And now another 3 months? Ugh!!!

employment for this new industry that could not exist without the corruption of big money in politics.

Getting money out of politics will kill this disease-carrying parasite off sooner than it came, and I won't be bothering to attend the funeral. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Personally I disagree with Lichtman's interpretation that the Iran Nuclear agreement and the opening of normal relations with Cuba isn't foreign military success because the public as a whole didn't take notice in order for that to happen the media has to play a major role in covering it to get the public's attention.And they did cover it negatively most of the time and plus the Iran agreement was agreed to right in the early stages of the republican primary and they were to focus on TRUMP TRUMP 95% of the time

love it to flip blue, this would only strengthen the incoming administration--assuming it's Democratic, but whatever. As for Lichtman et al's analysis, it's clearly very flawed, and I agree completely that, regardless of where some paying attention might stand if coverage were better, these issues just aren't important to the typical voter.

A 5% chance of Trump winning is still that 1 in 20 that all people hope against. You know, like the diagnosis that "you shouldn't worry. If you take your medication as prescribed, what you have has a 95% successful cure rate."

Sure, we all still feel nervous until the cure is confirmed. That's why we take our medicine as prescribed--in this case conduct an election campaign as if the odds were not so heavily stacked in our favor. The reason for that is that if we let down our guard for one minute, they no longer will be.