Trump and the Cubs had the same chance of winning



The Chicago Cubs won the World Series late Wednesday night, ending a 108-year drought, and delighting the city of Chicago, long-suffering fans — and a bunch of superstitious Trump supporters.

The Cubs came back from a 3-1 Cleveland series lead to clinch the title in Game 7, an outcome so statistically unlikely that at one point, oddsmakers noted that Donald Trump had a better chance of winning the presidency than the Cubs did of landing the pennant. And then, of course, they did.

SEE ALSO: 32,000 People Tweeted @Cubs In The Minute After They Won World Series

On October 30, when the Cubs were down 1-3, Nate Silver's site FiveThirtyEight wrote that the team had a smaller chance of winning than Trump did (and this was before Clinton's numbers really started to dip), though it did point out that such a come-from-behind championship victory can and does happen. In fact, it did as recently as the Cleveland Cavaliers' win over the Golden State Warriors last summer. By October 31, Trump's chances of winning in 538's "polls-plus" model were exactly the same as the Cubs'.

Depending on which side you support, this is either a foreboding sign of our imminent doom — or great news! Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway certainly noticed.

(Please note that she is now saying that Trump would need a "miracle" to win.)

In other sports-election victory analogies, Trump's chance of victory was, at one point, about the same as a professional football kicker missing a 29-yard field goal. Guess what happened the same day the New York Times wrote that?

Kickers from both teams missed 24 and 27 yard field goals to leave the Seattle Seahawks-Arizona Cardinals game in a tie. The New York Times is currently putting Clinton's chances of losing the election at that of an NFL kicker missing a 36 yarder.

Of course, sports victory and election victory chances are very different things, and it's much more common to see fluke sports results than political ones. Statistically, a kicker might make a chip shot field goal 99 times out of 100, but every kick presents a brand new opportunity to screw up. Trump's election victory odds are based on numerous polls of thousands of people across the country. The chances that all of them are that wrong are much smaller. But, as we were reminded when the Cubs won their first World Series since 1908 (and when the British voted to leave the European Union, defying most major polls), nothing is impossible.

The post So, Trump And The Cubs Had The Same Chance Of Winning appeared first on Vocativ.

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