We're not too far off. Main thng in original quote that bothered me was "So if Romney had won Florida, Silver would have been wrong, but ONLY A LITTLE WRONG."

We're not too far off. Main thng in original quote that bothered me was "So if Romney had won Florida, Silver would have been wrong, but ONLY A LITTLE WRONG." Predictions of victory or loss are either right or wrong. There are not degrees of rightness or wrongness with the prediction; it's either right or wrong. The probability analysis that the prediction is based on does admit of degrees; one probability assignment may be better or worse than another. But saying a prediction is "only a little wrong" implicitly refers to the probability assignment it was based on; it confuses the concepts of "prediction" and "probability". The probability assignment was not necessarily "wrong" to assign a higher probability to the event that didn't occur. It may have been a bad probability assignment, but discerning that would involve considering factors other than the outcome of the event.