95.8%

FiveThirtyEight is an excellent site that aggregates polling data from everywhere and uses statistical techniques I wish I understood better to get a high-level and maximally accurate (hopefully) snapshot of the state of the union. Watching the predictions on the site over the past couple weeks has been extremely encouraging and entertaining. Today, Obama's win percentage broke 95%:

GObama! That 4.2% still scares me though, because I see it in terms of Pascal's wager, where the payoff of Obama is some arbitrarily huge n and the payoff of Palin (McCain... whatever) is −∞. We can see then that:

n • P (Obama)

.958 • n = m,

where m is some huge number. Call it the risk of Obama, or how optimistic we should be about his presidency. But then compare it to:

(−∞) • P (Palin)

.042 • (−∞) = −∞.

That's how optimistic we should be about the possibility of Palin in the administration—not optimistic at all, the total opposite of optimistic. This means that I can't be at ease until that .042 gets much smaller. Like, zero-small. That would be good.

Twenty-one days of bated breath?