> It is very simple. It's actually not simple at all! This has been one of the most contentious questions of statistics for over a century. > All one has to

> It is very simple. It's actually not simple at all! This has been one of the most contentious questions of statistics for over a century. > All one has to do is imagine the election being repeated an infinity number of times under a stationary-non-changing distribution. That's using a frequentist interpretation of probability, which is not the only interpretation. (Nor is it, in fact, the interpretation used by e.g. Nate Silver, who is one of the statisticians mentioned in the article). (The frequentist interpretation, incidentally, has been shown to be self-contradictory, for reasons that involve continuous mathematics that I won't get into. In other words, you can construct situations that have nonsensical interpretations under the frequentist approach. That doesn't mean frequentist statistics aren't useful, but - like any model - the approach has limitations.)