I understand what the post is trying to convey, yet it is easy for someone to cast the election & football in an equivalent framework: increasing the number of

I understand what the post is trying to convey, yet it is easy for someone to cast the election & football in an equivalent framework: increasing the number of polls one of the statistician uses in order to narrow the confidence interval is equivalent to increasing the number of measurements you make on the football players & their environment before the game in order to narrow the confidence interval on the match outcome.. in other words you can interpret the confidence in the case of the election just as in the case of the football game, by stating that: 1. if your mathematical model of the population is accurate (eg. for instance your population really is voting using a binomial law of a certain probability p_democrat of voting for the democrat candidate) 2. and if the measurements (polls or player states) you have made give you that at least k voters out of N polled would have voted democrat then you can consider all the (hypothetical) instances of a population which would have resulted in a same or higher number of democrat voters for this poll, and you can compute the confidence interval that gives you the probability that such a population would indeed elect a democrat president So you don't necessarily have to view it in terms of "not changing the population vote, but changing the precision of the data", you can also cast it in just the framework of the football prediction