Posted on 05/03/2016 5:11:24 PM PDT by mandaladon
Statistician and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver famously used “big data” and his mathematical models to predict all 50 state outcomes in the 2012 general election, somehow besting his mark of 49 during the 2008 cycle. The one he got wrong that year: Indiana, which went to Barack Obama by a 0.1 percent margin.
For all the numbers and polls and graphs that likely passed Silver’s desk in the weeks prior to that November, the famed prognosticator needed only to focus on a 403-square mile plot of land along the road between Indianapolis and St. Louis.
There, the roughly 108,000 citizens of Vigo County, Indiana, self-described as “The Crossroads of America,” have been a perfect indicator in 30 of the 32 general elections since 1888. They haven’t missed the mark now for 60 years.
“It’s classic middle America,” former Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh told Politico last year. “Small businesses. Family farms. Community schools. We care more about common sense results than we do about party labels and ideology … You don’t get the excesses of New York or California. We keep it between the 40-yard-lines.”
Why the success rate? Your guess is as good as theirs. The county is predominantly white, rural and poor, and while a large percentage of the 76,981 registered voters are signed up as Democrats, more than half of the people in Terre Haute and the surrounding towns have no party affiliation and only vote in general elections.
Instead of staying on their side of the established party lines, people in the county are willing to listen to candidates and they’re willing to shift with the country.
The margin between Vigo and the rest of the nation has hovered around an average of only 4 percent in 124 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
Over Hillary too?
RejecTED, UntrusTED, DefeaTED.
Cankles will not be the Demonorat nominee.
Biteme will be the nominee.
Watching lying Carly now. What a phoney!
What the heck? Fiorina is doing Cruz’s concession speech!!!
Is there a precedent for hiding behind skirts in this way??
Either that or it portends just how far this country had gone off the deep end.
Oh wait, here he comes, she was just introducing
Nate Silver is a fraud he has been 100 percent wrong on Trump. he had inside info from Obama..Silver is aphoney
All kinds of frauds are being exposed in this election cycle. Such an interesting race.
Vigo County IN has 62% in
64% Trump
28% Cruz
SO THERE!
You have such a way with words. Really.
It’s up to the American people who kicks whose butt and the American people are not very smart.
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