4 ms·

If Clinton has lost only one of her firewall states, your comment would have applied. The fact that Trump flipped quite a few of them makes it no longer a close

by NhanH 10y ago

If Clinton has lost only one of her firewall states, your comment would have applied. The fact that Trump flipped quite a few of them makes it no longer a close one. If two countries play a best-of-5 soccer games, and one beat the other 3-0 with three consecutive 1-0 games in the last minute. It would have been hard to claim that one team isn't obviously better and the margin of winning is small.

mikeash 10y ago
Those firewall states mostly went by 1-2% margins. Your analogy is flawed. The individual "games" weren't that skewed. Instead, imagine two basketball teams play best-of-5. The scores are 100-98, 101-99, 100-101, 99-100, and 98-100. It would be bizarre to say that one team was greatly superior based on that, even though they did have a big margin in percentage of games won.
- NhanH 10y ago
  I don't necessary agree with your argument of extending the analogy to include more states (I would have agreed with that had Clinton actually flipped states that was leaning red, she didn't). The most logical analogy if we are to extends the game would be saying that they were playing a best-of-50, and Trump wins with a score of 306 to 232, which is a huge difference in score. Yes, that would be a pretty bad/ awkward analogy and is pretty irrelevant to your point - I could make the argument that the games were scored differently, and the team that knows to win the necessary one would be the superior team. That would be too rationalizing, however. On further reflection, I do agree that the election was close. I'm guessing my previous response was conditioned on Trump being the underdog, arguing on a different point you were making.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I'm not extending the analogy to include more states (games are equivalent to states here), but rather changing the scores to reflect how close many of the states/games were. Your "most logical analogy" still isn't quite right. The individual scores for each game were very close, and the total scores actually slightly favor Clinton. But Trump won more games, after weighting the games in a certain way. But I don't know how to do it better, I don't think there's any sport that's really played anything like this! I'd say the best measure for closeness would be either how much of a shift in the overall vote was needed to flip the result, or how much of a targeted shift could generate a change in the result. In this case, an overall shift of 1-2% would have changed the result, and a targeted shift of some tens of thousands of votes could have. It's not the closest election ever (2000 probably takes that prize by these criteria) but it's fairly close compared to, say, 2012 and 2008.

by NhanH 10y ago

mikeash 10y ago

Those firewall states mostly went by 1-2% margins. Your analogy is flawed. The individual "games" weren't that skewed. Instead, imagine two basketball teams play best-of-5. The scores are 100-98, 101-99, 100-101, 99-100, and 98-100. It would be bizarre to say that one team was greatly superior based on that, even though they did have a big margin in percentage of games won.

NhanH 10y ago
I don't necessary agree with your argument of extending the analogy to include more states (I would have agreed with that had Clinton actually flipped states that was leaning red, she didn't). The most logical analogy if we are to extends the game would be saying that they were playing a best-of-50, and Trump wins with a score of 306 to 232, which is a huge difference in score. Yes, that would be a pretty bad/ awkward analogy and is pretty irrelevant to your point - I could make the argument that the games were scored differently, and the team that knows to win the necessary one would be the superior team. That would be too rationalizing, however. On further reflection, I do agree that the election was close. I'm guessing my previous response was conditioned on Trump being the underdog, arguing on a different point you were making.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I'm not extending the analogy to include more states (games are equivalent to states here), but rather changing the scores to reflect how close many of the states/games were. Your "most logical analogy" still isn't quite right. The individual scores for each game were very close, and the total scores actually slightly favor Clinton. But Trump won more games, after weighting the games in a certain way. But I don't know how to do it better, I don't think there's any sport that's really played anything like this! I'd say the best measure for closeness would be either how much of a shift in the overall vote was needed to flip the result, or how much of a targeted shift could generate a change in the result. In this case, an overall shift of 1-2% would have changed the result, and a targeted shift of some tens of thousands of votes could have. It's not the closest election ever (2000 probably takes that prize by these criteria) but it's fairly close compared to, say, 2012 and 2008.