Whew! Your Lost Coast Outpost just got off the phone with David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University. I was curious to talk with the professor because of this quote, attributed to him, that appeared in a KQED.com story that appeared yesterday:

“[Norman Solomon] has to win by my estimate somewhere between 30 and 35% of the remaining votes in order to overtake Roberts.”

Well, long story short: This is all-the-way wrong. 

After much talk of probability curves and margin of error rates and other arcana of statistical analysis, it appears that what the professor intended to say was that for Norman Solomon to have a 95 percent certainty of victory at this moment in time, then between 30 and 35 percent of the uncounted ballots would have to be for Solomon. Which is certainly a measure of something.

However, I can confirm that McCuan is an analyst, and that he talks to media multiple times a day, and that he has a day job, and that generally speaking he doesn’t appreciate it when someone calls him wrong.