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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Quibble: since this is done by Electoral College adjusted voting, it wasn't "almost dead even" by that accounting, as of right now the AP called Arizona for Trump, making it 290-228. Michigan leans him, New Hampshire leans Hillary, if those two break in those ways, it'll be 316-232, which is fairly big as these things go, close to Obama's 2012 win.

About as big as I expected, although not quite as big as I hoped, then again, there are always surprises in Presidential elections. I didn't expect Trump to get Pennsylvania (or Toomey to win), I expected Russ Feingold to win (yesterday saw a report on the general issue of Team Hillary ignoring/taking for granted the Rust Belt, including ignoring a plea for help from Feingold), and one of the biggest surprises is that Minnesota truly was in play (margin looks to have gone from ~200K in 2012 to ~40K).

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To quote sshumaker, above:

>..a 1% shift from Trump to Clinton would have resulted in her victory.

Here's an excellent analysis from five-thirty-eight: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-perc...

How have they not finished counting and called those remaining states yet? Do they just give up once somebody gets over 270? Ah, fuggit, nobody cares anymore...?

Many states have automatic recount policies or laws if an election is too close, and that can kick in for positions other than president, and obviously every Federal House seat was up for election. That might cover Michigan, but it would not seem New Hampshire, e.g. Senator i.e. statewide race Kelly Ayotte lost by 743 votes and has conceded.

Or maybe AP calls it if a candidate concedes? Guess we'll just have to wait, and for California, they've got over 4 million absentee ballots to count....

The only example I've heard of where "Ah, fuggit" kicks in is when enough ballots have been counted that the absentee ones can't change any race, and the extra labor is not considered to be worth it.

The electoral college margin doesn't mean a whole lot. Tiny swings in the vote can result in huge swings in the electoral college. If you lose your balance on top of a mountain, teeter both ways, then fall to the right, the fact that you might come to rest miles from the peak doesn't mean it wasn't a near thing.

The electoral college margin doesn't mean a whole lot.

Except, for, you know, who administratively runs the country for the next 4 years, has the bully pulpit and therefore potentially great influence over the Congress, etc. etc. etc.?

It sure seems to mean a whole lot based on all the sad faces and rioting in the streets I've seen over the last few days.

And, circling back to the real point, it's the rules of the game, claiming some sort of greater meaning only when your side loses the popular vote is beyond pointless.

You seem to have missed the presence of the word "margin" in the quoted words, as well as my entire point.

To remind you, my point is that the election was very close. It is not that the result is bogus or nobody cares or it's meaningless.

A tiny shift in sentiment would have changed the outcome of the election. The fact that the margin of electors is about 14% doesn't change that fact. The electors are not a meaningful measure of how close the race was.

If Clinton has lost only one of her firewall states, your comment would have applied. The fact that Trump flipped quite a few of them makes it no longer a close one.

If two countries play a best-of-5 soccer games, and one beat the other 3-0 with three consecutive 1-0 games in the last minute. It would have been hard to claim that one team isn't obviously better and the margin of winning is small.

Those firewall states mostly went by 1-2% margins.

Your analogy is flawed. The individual "games" weren't that skewed. Instead, imagine two basketball teams play best-of-5. The scores are 100-98, 101-99, 100-101, 99-100, and 98-100. It would be bizarre to say that one team was greatly superior based on that, even though they did have a big margin in percentage of games won.

I don't necessary agree with your argument of extending the analogy to include more states (I would have agreed with that had Clinton actually flipped states that was leaning red, she didn't). The most logical analogy if we are to extends the game would be saying that they were playing a best-of-50, and Trump wins with a score of 306 to 232, which is a huge difference in score. Yes, that would be a pretty bad/ awkward analogy and is pretty irrelevant to your point - I could make the argument that the games were scored differently, and the team that knows to win the necessary one would be the superior team. That would be too rationalizing, however.

On further reflection, I do agree that the election was close. I'm guessing my previous response was conditioned on Trump being the underdog, arguing on a different point you were making.

I'm not extending the analogy to include more states (games are equivalent to states here), but rather changing the scores to reflect how close many of the states/games were.

Your "most logical analogy" still isn't quite right. The individual scores for each game were very close, and the total scores actually slightly favor Clinton. But Trump won more games, after weighting the games in a certain way. But I don't know how to do it better, I don't think there's any sport that's really played anything like this!

I'd say the best measure for closeness would be either how much of a shift in the overall vote was needed to flip the result, or how much of a targeted shift could generate a change in the result. In this case, an overall shift of 1-2% would have changed the result, and a targeted shift of some tens of thousands of votes could have. It's not the closest election ever (2000 probably takes that prize by these criteria) but it's fairly close compared to, say, 2012 and 2008.

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