Eric Cantor’s Loss Was Like an Earthquake

Everybody is talking how it was big and far-reaching surprise, but here Nate Silver has something more subtle in mind: The statistics of Republican primary results look a lot like those of earthquakes, and he presents the graphs to show it. Major primary upsets, like serious earthquakes, are rare but they do happen. Furthermore, they are fundamentally random and unpredictable.

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Nate Silver wrote this before the fall of Eric Cantor: The Political Media Still Fall for the Hot-Hand Fallacy.

He referred to it afterwards:

I warned ‘ya that folks were drawing too many conclusions from Mitch McConnell’s win. Primaries are pretty random.