I am definitely not confusing the two. My entire point is you can't look at the colors of Nate's map and the colors of the results map and say he got 50/50 because Nate's map is explicitly predicting some probability of a win in each state. They may be color coded but his prediction in a given state wasn't "Obama wins" or "Romney wins" but was instead "there is an x% chance that Obama wins.". My point relies entirely on my understanding that what was predicted in the big map is a percentage chance, not a result and not a vote share.
I may be communicating poorly but I feel I made that distinction clear in my post where I say "he predicted a 50.3% chance of an Obama win", "he had Obama at 79.4% chance to win", "makes me wonder if we really had enough data to justify such a large %". That last one is ambiguous but in the context it means "such a large % chance to win."
I don't know how to better clarify my post other than to restate that I am confident I am not confusing the two.
My point was simply that when a longshot comes in or is close to coming in, it's possible you were wrong about it being a longshot. It doesn't mean you were, but it's the first place to look for continued analysis.
I didn't know until just a few moments ago that Nate also had his vote share predictions on the blog. I've just compared all of those to the actual results and found only one state to be outside of his given margin of error.
The confusion is probably due to the other commentators assuming you knew about Nate's vote share predictions when you didn't.
You don't think you are confusing "the two", since you thought that Nate only had one set of numbers in the first place.
The other commentators see you using vote share results to question winner probabilities, and assume that you're confusing Nate's winner probabilities with Nate's vote share predictions, since it would make more sense to compare vote share results with the vote share predictions.
I may be communicating poorly but I feel I made that distinction clear in my post where I say "he predicted a 50.3% chance of an Obama win", "he had Obama at 79.4% chance to win", "makes me wonder if we really had enough data to justify such a large %". That last one is ambiguous but in the context it means "such a large % chance to win."
I don't know how to better clarify my post other than to restate that I am confident I am not confusing the two.
My point was simply that when a longshot comes in or is close to coming in, it's possible you were wrong about it being a longshot. It doesn't mean you were, but it's the first place to look for continued analysis.
I didn't know until just a few moments ago that Nate also had his vote share predictions on the blog. I've just compared all of those to the actual results and found only one state to be outside of his given margin of error.
http://pastebin.com/0RB5GRjQ