Actually, the reason I had backing out in the back of my mind is that, when I was looking at houses a few years ago, one property I was considering would have had me backing out onto a busy street - I figured that if I bought the house, I would be backing out into traffic once or twice a day for the next twenty or thirty years - and the chances or odds were that sooner or later, I would get hit. Similarly, I recently changed the route I take to the grocery store, thinking that if I were to keep taking the narrow street with limited visibility at the corners, I would have a greater chance of being involved in some kind of accident than if I took a 'safer' route. But in either case, how the 'chance' could be reduced to a mathematical formula that could give a meaningful result expressed as a percentage is beyond me - as in the election, there are so many variables that it would be impossible to take even most of them into consideration.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I can get the idea that bookmakers can come up with odds on someone winning an election, but I don't get the notion of someone having a certain percentage chance of winning - even if it is just another way of saying what the odds are ... which I guess it is ....