500: Election

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Election
Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions.  'Should I sleep with her?'  'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'
Title text: Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions. 'Should I sleep with her?' 'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'

Explanation

This comic was published the day after the 2008 presidential election in the US. Cueball has been closely following the election for over a year and a half, and he seems to be relieved that it's over. Now that the election has passed, he does not have to follow the many different opinion polls, number-crunching analyses, and news clips about people like Joe the Plumber that he has kept close track of during the election season. As soon as he says this, however, he starts to search for information on the 2012 election, suggesting that his political obsession has not at all passed.

The alt-text is about statistician Nate Silver, who correctly predicted the outcomes of 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 election on his blog. It suggests that having him predict the outcomes of life decisions would make choosing the best thing to do very easy.

Transcript

Cueball sits at his computer desk, staring at his computer.

It's over.
After twenty months it's finally over.
I don't have to be an election junkie anymore.

Closeup of Cueball's face and screen.

I don't have to care about opinion polls, exit polls, margins of error, attack ads, game-changers, tracking polls, swing states, swing votes, the Bradley effect, or <name> the <occupation>.
I'm free.

Cueball staring at his computer screen, full shot. Cueball types on his computer. <<Tap Tap>>

On screen: Google '2012 polling statistics'


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Discussion

Is this genuinely a thing that Americans do during election years? Davidy²²[talk] 22:49, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes 172.69.70.173 02:31, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
Oh my god yes. Actually, we start midway through the year before. 172.68.38.98 23:16, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
The first Democratic debate for the 2020 election was in June of 2019. Cwallenpoole (talk) 23:07, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Absolutely. There's lots of coverage on the Presidential race for about 20-24 months before the general election, then a few months after that it's time to start thinking about midterms and off-year local elections. QoopyQoopy (talk) 00:56, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

I'm surprised no-one has pointed out yet how wrong Nate Silver was about the outcome of the 2016 election! -- The Cat Lady (talk) 21:16, 15 August 2021 (UTC)