A lead and no chance
Right now, Romney is leading by over 1.5 million votes in the popular vote and is up by 17 in the electoral college, and he has virtually no chance to win the election. 
What should we expect from Silver?
Silver’s predictions for each state are made in terms of probabilities. So, sometimes he’ll get those right and other he’ll get wrong totally based on random chance. But how much should we expect from him? Should we expect him to get every single one of his predictions correct?
Let’s assume that the probabilities he reports are 100% accurate (that’s a huge assumption, but I’m doing it) and we simulate the election thousands of times. Based on these simulations, how many of Silver’s predictions do we expect him to get wrong.
Using Silver’s 56 state presidential win probabilities from last Friday, we can consider Silver’s prediction in each state to be the candidate who has the higher probability. Now, taking those same probabilities, we can simulate an election based on those probabilities and compare those to Silver predictions. Now, we can run this simulation thousands of times, and count how many times Silver’s predictions are expected to be wrong. According to these simulations Silver is expected to get every one correct only about 5% of the time based on his probabilities if this election was run many, many times. So it’s very likely that he gets at least one state wrong. It’s to be expected. At the other end of the spectrum, there is only about a 1.6% chance that Silver gets more than 5 states wrong.
This means we should expect that Silver , about 93.4% of the time, will get somewhere between 1 and 5 states incorrect. 55% of the simulations, more than half, have Silver getting either 2 or 3 states incorrect, and the average number of incorrect predictions in my simulations was 2.4522.
So, what should we expect from Silver? We should expect him to miss at least one state, and most likely to miss 2 or 3 states.
Cheers.
Merlin Miller vs Roseanne Barr
Merlin Miller is currently beating Roseanne Barr in presidential voting. 
CBS has Ohio leaning Obama
We have moved the state of Ohio into the ‘lean’ category for Obama. – CBS
Early Election Results
Google has a really nice results page set-up. Here are the results as of 7:27pm on election night:
Cheers.
The Passion of Nate Silver (Sort Of)
From Natalia Cecire’s blog:
Nate Silver’s models can tell us how likely it is that Obama will “win” (the game). They can’t, and absolutely do not aim to, explain, say, the role of race in the election. And they cannot give definitive predictions either, only probabilities: that’s the point. Statistics always pulls back from the claims it makes; if it did not do so, it would not be statistics. Statistics is an inherently puerile discipline, not because it is dominated by men but because its principles concord so strongly with the way we have constructed boyhood—an unrelenting commitment to the play of abstract forms above all else: above wishes, above belief, above ethics, its only ethics being a commitment to the rules of the game. It presumes being unable to really know “the answer,” except as defined and bounded by the game.
Stats in the Wild 