[direwolf]

Nate Silver's take on today's news.

"My hunch (like The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel’s) is that Weiner is such a tragicomic figure, and such a lightning rod for news coverage, that he could insulate Clinton from some of the fallout she might have suffered otherwise. There are also fewer undecided voters now than there were in July, voter choices are more locked in, and many people have already voted — which could lessen the impact.

Even so, the news could get Republican partisans riled up, increasing turnout, and could play into a closing message for Trump about Clinton’s “corruption” — if he’s disciplined enough to sustain one. At a minimum, there’s no upside in the story for Clinton.

To repeat, our forecasts won’t show any impact until and unless the polls do. But in general, FiveThirtyEight’s models are relatively quick about detecting trends from the polls. At the same time, they account for a greater amount of uncertainty than most other models, which results in a better chance for the trailing candidate (in this case, Trump). Our forecast already saw Clinton as less of a sure thing than other models, which variously give her a 92 percent to a 99 percent chance of winning as compared with our roughly 80 percent chance, and that gap could widen in the coming days."

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...nthony-weiner/