In this thread, I would like to ask everyone to temporarily disregard their distaste for Trump (or Hillary) and look at this election from a sheer sports-odds, unlikely-probability standpoint:
How big of an upset would a Trump victory over Hillary rank, among all the presidential elections to date?
Trump would be a political outsider with almost no political experience, running as the nominee of the outnumbered party (IIRC, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by more than 20 million), against one of the most experienced and qualified candidates in modern history (Hillary,) who has been in the national-level political arena for two decades, who has been a Senator and Secretary of State, and who has a vast edge in fundraising.
Is this akin to Appalachian State vs. Michigan - in another words, an epic upset - or is it more like a 22 ranked college football team taking on a 3# ranked team - an upset, but hardly unheard of?
Hillary Clinton is not a great campaigner, she got crushed by Obama despite massive advantages and had trouble putting away Sanders who should have been nothing but a foot note. We are also coming off 8 years of a Democratic presidency, something that SHOULD help the Republicans. As a head to head match up Hillary is obviously favored, but it’s not a Globetrotters vs Generals upset, I think for Trump a bigger upset was winning the Republican primaries in the first place.
I’m not sure the analogy of a single game works. A Presidential campaign is a long process, like a baseball season, not a single game where one side might have the day of their lives.
So a better analogy would be, say, a team with what appears to be a roster of sad rejects playing winning ball all year and everyone’s saying over and over “It’s a fluke, they’ll come back to earth” and they never do and win it all.
Well, the polls breathlessly, insistently and predictably have it a dead heat, so in sports odds it’s 6 for 5 and pick’em.
I’d prefer to think that, media grab for eyeballs aside, and the excessively amplified voices of the Deplorables aside, Trump is a 100:1 shot or longer.
One of the best hitters in the National League this year is DJ LeMahieu. This year, he has an on-base percentage of .417 against the team he’s playing tonight-- the St. Louis Cardinals.
According to Nate Silver, Trump has a 41.8% chance of winning in the Polls-Only forecast.
That means that, right now, Trump has a better chance of winning than LeMahieu has of getting on base tonight.
So to answer your question: Not that big of an upset (on paper). But still a pretty huge upset for what his victory would represent for our country. Perhaps comparable to Major League Baseball switching over to slow-pitch softball.
This is like saying that, in the final last few minutes of the Miracle on Ice, when the USA was leading the Soviet Union 4-3, that an American victory wouldn’t be an “upset” because the Americans had a 4-3 lead.
(Not that I’m saying that Trump is USA and Hillary is Soviets, but you get my point)
It’s a titanic upset measuring from the beginning of the ‘season’. The 76’er’s make no off season moves (based on their 10-72 record in 2015-16), Golden State keeps its nucleus that allowed it to go 73-9 though fail to win the finals, adds Kevin Durant as they have, but next June Philadelphia has made it to the finals v GS and knotted the series 2-2, though GS was more impressive in its wins (to try to somehow approximate that this election isn’t exactly tied, but arguably it makes no difference how you win games in a playoff series and you just can’t represent a 1% lead in the polls by reference to an integral number of wins).
But counting from now, not very much of an upset, just as it wouldn’t be in the case above once you’d seen Philly beat better, on paper, teams all year and in the earlier playoff rounds, and seen them playing GS to a standstill. Those who thought Philly would stink at winning games were wrong. But you still might reasonably judge it more likely the better team on paper will eventually pull it out.
Just trying to construct such an analogy though makes you think how much less substantive politics is than sports in some respects. There are real factual reasons a bottom NBA team couldn’t reach the finals and beat the previous year’s top team without major personnel changes in favor of the bad team. Politics is much more ethereal.
Or maybe substitute a more apparently flawed team than GS that manages to beat them in an earlier round of the playoffs but Philly still ‘shouldn’t’ be there and many still expected it to be routed in 4 straight.
Still, teams which will win are more objectively identifiable than politicians who will win. They have people better at achieving/preventing the physical event of putting the ball in the basket, and the important indirect physical acts leading to that. Handicapping politics is much more of a head game, name calling the public when it doesn’t reach the ‘right’ decision, etc.
The Warriors were a paper tiger with fundamental flaws that choked a huge lead. Sounds about right. But yeah, I’d rather watch Curry shoot threes or Draymond kick dudes in the balls than listen to a Hillary speech.
No, my point was, as I’ve said in other threads, that EVERY presidential race comes down to “just too darn close to call” in the final eight weeks or so, regardless of how obvious it is one candidate is leading. The media has to maintain the fiction of a close race to keep viewership up.
As has been pointed out, it also tends to drive voters to the polls and doesn’t let the party with the modest lead get lazy about actually showing up. But. News as ratings-driven infotainment sucks on all levels, this handwaving scam included.
The betting line on my account is currently Trump +160 and Hillary -210. IOW, if you bet $100 on Trump, you win $160 if he wins the election. If you want to win $100 on Hillary, you need to risk $210. Since there is a vig, the midpoint is Trump +185 and Clinton -185. I’m not sure what this translates to in probability of winning, but I’m sure one of our math experts can figure it out quickly.
I have a bias obviously, but an arrogant empty suit who may have a serious mental illness and ties to Russia, who is running on white resentment in an age where almost 30% of voters are non-white? Whose base of support is poorly educated whites, when that demographic is smaller than it has ever been? That should be pretty hard to pull off.
The fact that we’ve had 8 years of democratic rule, combined with Hillary being a weak candidate, combined with so many people (especially millennials) wanting to vote third party could get Trump in office. So I don’t know if there is a sports metaphor because sports do not have people choosing the third option like they will this election. Third and fourth parties will do better than they have since 1996 in this election.
The fact that we’ve had 8 years of democratic rule, combined with Hillary being a weak candidate, combined with so many people (especially millennials) wanting to vote third party could get Trump in office. So I don’t know if there is a sports metaphor because sports do not have people choosing the third option like they will this election. Third and fourth parties will do better than they have since 1996 in this election.
The conversion from ‘American odds’ to probably of the favorite is abs
[quote]
/(100+abs
[quote]
) so 185/285~64.9%. However if you look around the various sites odds vary more than very slightly. Oddschecker has many though in fractional odds, for example 8/15 for Clinton, 13/8 for Trump which averages out to 63.5 for Clinton avg (15/(8+15), 1-13/(8+13)). But those vary a few % from one quote to the next. 538’s model just ticked to 55-45 a half hour ago. I don’t think it’s superior/inferior per se, but wonder about the depth of the betting market and how much the models influence the betting, don’t know how live the betting numbers are either, for example to say they differ from 538, which was closer to them earlier today.