When Hillary Clinton won the nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in July 2016, she celebrated her victory speech with words that foreshadowed her campaign message: Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president…When any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone. When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit. In this exuberant declaration, Clinton introduced the image of the glass ceiling which spoke of a female president who would pave the way for not just her success but the success of all female Americans. This focus on women in America is closely linked …

Donald Trump’s presidential election victory has—among many others—upset political commentators. Few predicted the outcome. Most used periodic polling and historical trends to predict that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win. Almost every step of the way, from the primaries to election night, there were election analysts who failed to acknowledge Trump as a credible contender. Studies of the electoral map suggested the pathway to the White House was nearly unachievable for Trump. He would need to win all of the big swing states to reach the required 270 Electoral College votes. In the end Clinton won the popular vote but Trump received 290 Electoral College votes compared to Clinton’s 228 – a clear victory. Trump’s triumph has shocked a …

The majority of forecasts point to Hilary Clinton winning tomorrow’s US presidential election. Several of the poll, market and expert forecasts with probabilities for who will win are helpfully summarised by the New York Times here.  The polls-based predictions are all, apart from one, pretty confident that Clinton will win. At the time of writing, Drew Linzer’s model at Daily Kos puts the probability of a Clinton win at 87%, HuffPost has 98% and Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium estimate is as high as 99%. The New York Times’ own model is slightly less confident, on 84%. The exception is Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight model which puts Clinton’s chances at just 67%. The lower probability for Clinton in the FiveThirtyEight model …