Nate Silver, the statistics guru known for his accurate predictions in the political arena as well as in the world of sports, has mashed up the two topics nicely in his current Five Thirty Eight newsletter.
For college football fans, he has created a way of keeping tabs on the swing states in the presidential election by thinking of the competition between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as a matchup of the Atlantic Coast Conference vs. the Big Ten Conference:
Under the headline, “Which states shape up as most important?” Silver offers this:
It’s still early enough — and we’re lacking recent, high-quality polling in enough states — that I’d discourage you from fixating on any one exact combination of states that Clinton or Trump might win to clinch the Electoral College. Instead, you might think of this election as a battle between the Big Ten states and the ACC states, either of which offer a plausible path to victory for Clinton. If she holds on to most of the Big Ten states that President Obama won four years ago, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, she can afford to lose ACC states such as Florida, Virginia and North Carolina. If she can win either Florida or both Virginia and North Carolina — and certainly if she sweeps all three ACC states — she can sacrifice quite a bit of ground in the Big Ten. The handful of competitive states outside of these groups, such as Nevada and New Hampshire, have few e-
Silver
nough electoral votes that they’ll serve as tiebreakers only in the event of an extremely close race. According to our tipping-point index, however, the single most important state is Florida. That’s because its 29 electoral votes are as much as many combinations of two and three swing states put together.
As Clinton’s lead in the polls shrinks, Silver points out that there’s more uncertainty in this race than most political observers believe. In part, that’s because an extraordinary number of voters — close to 20 percent — say they’re undecided or that they plan to vote for third-party candidates. At a comparable point in the presidential campaign four years ago, only 5 to 10 percent of voters fell into those categories.
High numbers of undecided and third-party voters create higher volatility and larger polling errors. Put another way, Silver says, “elections are harder to predict when fewer people have made up their minds.”
