FiveThirtyEight: On the morning of the U.S. presidential election, we pointed out that there were three scenarios for what might transpire that night, each of which were about equally likely. In Scenario No. 1, the polls would be spot-on; Hillary Clinton would win narrowly, with a 3-to-4 percentage point popular victory and somewhere on the order of 300 electoral votes. In Scenario No. 2, Clinton would outperform her polls, leading to a near-landslide victory and possible wins in states such as Arizona and Georgia which had traditionally favored Republicans. And in Scenario No. 3, Donald Trump would beat his polls; because the Electoral College favored Trump, even a small polling error in his favor would probably be enough to make him president. Scenario No. 3 is the one that transpired, but it wasn’t any more or less likely than the other two.
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