On election night, the odds were roughly 5 to 1 on PredictIt

On Huffington Post, the odds were 98% Clinton, iirc. I suspect this led some people to not vote.

Here it is: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/high-probability-clinto...

In 538 the odds were 70% for Clinton. I think the result was spot on.

There's no logical conflict between saying Clinton had a 10 to 1 chance of winning and Trump actually winning. 10 to 1 still means Trump wins 10% of the time.

I don't know why you were down voted. It should be obvious, but people still interpret odds like that as it was a sure thing.

Part of the problem is a confusion between raw poll results—where 59-41 means almost certain victory to one side—and statistical likelihood.

On election night, Fivethirtyeight gave Trump a 29 percent chance of winning the electoral college. Not a 71-29 poll result, a nearly three-in-ten chance of winning. Let that sink in for a second, and reevaluate the media narrative that the pollsters got it wrong.

Odds like that are meaningless (imo) for singular events. It's a good bet in repeatable scenarios, far less so in elections.

When you take a bet, you play the odds. You evaluate your expected return should you take many such bets, and if it's positive and you can afford to lose, the smart money is in taking the bet.

In fact this is true of most anything you do in life - when you drove to work this morning you played the odds and the wager was your life against your salary. I'm sure you didn't think about it that way, but you took the bet

Both insurance companies and bookmakers are comfortable aggregating over many unique events.