re: #118 EPR-radar

But this present day democratic advantage in the electoral college seems like a strange and temporary affair to me.

Why? Seems to me it’s because you want to view it that way and have no data to back up the POV. Texas’s demographics are shifting it inexorably towards the D column, CO and NM are now reliably blue states and the Dems have a lock on the entire Northeast and West Coast.

The structure of the EV (extra representation to small states) favors the GOP by over-representing rural areas where the GOP is strong.

Viewed in a vacuum maybe. In the real world the populous states are still winner take all and in no danger of diluting their votes. In fact, currently, only reliably red Nebraska has any real chance of splitting it’s votes.

I think the pattern Nate Silver is seeing is a basically meaningless artifact of who is winning which states by how much.

You do this a lot, just dismissively wave off all evidence that runs counter to your preconceived thesis without presenting anything concrete to back it up. The fact is that the ups and downs of national sentiment track very close to the state by state data, which is why aggregators like Silver, Wang, and Linzer use it. Each state has a more or less predictable deviance to the national norm, which is what makes state by state polling predictive. If what you want to believe was true, that it’s all just a meaningless artifact, there’d be no advantage to using it versus national polling data.