Politics

Nearly half of American voters who support either Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump for the White House said they will mainly be trying to block the other side from winning, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday. Simply put, as Reuters notes, the 2016 U.S. presidential election may turn out to be one of the world's biggest un-popularity contests.

Submitted by Salil Mehta Of Statistical Ideas

The Flip-Flopping Pollster

How poor have the election forecasters been this year?  It is a topic many are discussing given the large number of upsets we've had during the Primaries.  For example, statistician Nate Silver (who started the campaign season proclaiming Trump had <2% chance of being nominated) by March 1 predicted with 94% probability that Trump would win Alaska (he lost). 

Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,

Spawning a hurricane of controversy on Wednesday, the New York Times claimed, all emphasis added, “the question of whether to embrace Mr. Trump is not merely an intellectual exercise. Some staff members at the Republican National Committee were told Wednesday that if they were unable to get behind the nominee, they should leave by the end of the week.”

As we reported yesterday, just when Hillary thought the email scandal was behind her, and she could shift her focus to the newly minted GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, an order by Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court decided to lay out ground rules for interviewing multiple State Department officials, and ordered at least six current and former State Department employees to answer questions, all in an effort to finish the depositions in the weeks before the party nominating conventions.