I recommend today’s Huffington Post column on Nate Silver’s unusually pessimistic (and reactionary) electoral model.
Author Evan Cohen makes this observation:
In my more than 20 years of building and managing financial and statistical models first as an investment banker and for the past 15 years as an economic consultant, the mantra for model building has always been “garbage in, garbage out.” You can have the most intricate set of assumptions, but if your model is spitting out unrealistic results, there’s something wrong with your model.
He pays particular attention to 538’s high probabilities for exceedingly unlikely scenarios:
...a deeper examination of this distribution makes you wonder what’s in their model. The histogram above shows more than a 7 percent chance that Clinton gets fewer than 200 EVs. There is not a remotely plausible map that has Clinton with less than 200 EVs, let alone less than 150 EVs, which occur in at least one percent of 538’s model runs!
I’ll stop quoting and encourage you to check out the article yourself. It’s a nice read for those of looking for a little reassurance as we count down the hours to Election Day!
For the record, my own prediction is 323 EVs for Hillary (just missing in Ohio and Iowa, but adding North Carolina to Obama’s 2012 map).