Nate Silver Challenge: August Update

Wow, what a crazy few weeks in the Presidential election! It’s been about a month since my last “Nate Silver Challenge” update (If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check out my original post here: http://www.kenflerlage.com/2016/07/im-calling-out-nate-silver.html) So, here’s my August update.

I’ve only made one change this month, moving Nevada back over to Clinton (last month, I moved it from Clinton to Trump). I also decided to add an electoral vote tracker on my map. But don’t worry, I did not spend much time on this, as promised. Calculating electoral votes is quite easy since every state except Maine and Nebraska awards all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state. Maine and Nebraska allocate one vote to the winner of each congressional district (Maine has two, while Nebraska has three) and the remaining to the winner of the state (both states have two). For these, I simply made an educated guess (Call me lazy, but I really didn’t think it was of much value to look at polls and voting history for each district, just to estimate 5 total electoral votes).

At the time of my July update, Mr. Silver and I differed on four states: Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, but he seems to have come to his senses and, at the time of this post, we have the same projections for each state. Interestingly, we somehow differ quite significantly in the electoral vote count. I have 346 for Clinton and 192 for Trump, while Silver has 313.4 for Clinton and 224.4 for Trump. I’m not really sure how he came to this calculation (they only add up to 537.8 and I don’t think it’s even possible to get 0.4 of an electoral vote), but he’s definitely smarter than me, so who knows!!

My current projections are as follows.

Clinton– California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

Trump– Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming

Reminder:

• You can interact with my election map on Tableau Public: https://public.tableau.com/profile/ken.flerlage#!/vizhome/Election2016_7/Election2016.
• Or, if you’d like to view the map interactively as part of the post, you can check it out on my website, www.kenflerlage.com. (LinkedIn does not allow embedded Tableau Public visualizations, unfortunately).
• And you can view Silver’s “Polls Plus” projections on FiveThirtyEight: http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/#plus.

Check back at the end of September for my next update.

Ken Flerlage, August 29, 2016