"But Lichtman is not guessing as if it were a coin toss."

Not what I said. Please respond to the comment, not your strawman.

"No one is saying that his record is proof positive that his methods work. "

I don't know, I think Julie's comment about invoking predicting 9 out of 10 is in fact doing just that. Maybe she can clarify.

"Besides which "a little under 10 people" besides Lichtman? Name them."

I don't think you understood what I wrote. In fact, I'm sure you didn't, because you cannot actually have a fraction of a person making a prediction. I'm not pointing to specific people making guesses. I'm pointing out that with 1,000 people making guesses, you will get about 9.77 who will correctly guess 9 out of 10 presidential elections. There is no actual such thing as .77 of a person who can make such a prediction. These are not actual people I am identifying. I am talking about the probability of false positives even if the method used to guess is worthless.

"You are completely misunderstanding the probability math at work here."

No, I am not. To demonstrate that, I will walk you through all of it.

Odds of calling one particular presidential race completely at random assuming you're only picking between two major party candidates: 1/2.

Binomial formula for the probability of getting K successes (correct predictions) in N trials (total number of predictions) with the success of each trial being p is

P(X=k) =(N) p^k(1-p)^n-k

(k)

For us, N is 10 (total number of predictions), K is 9 for the number of correct predictions, and p is 0.5 The bonimal coefficient of n over k in parenthesis is

n!/k!(n-k)!

At that point it's just arithmetic P(X=9) =10(1/2)^9(1/2)=10(1/2)^10= 10(1/1024)=10/1024=5/512.

The probability of any one person getting 9 out of 10 presidential predictions correctly just by guessing is 5/512, or slightly off 0.977 percent.

Now, if we hypothesize 1,000 people all doing this process, with our 5/512 conclusion from before, we have a simple product of number of people attempting independently by the odds of overall success. 1,000 *0.977 =9.77.

You say I misunderstand the probability math? Show me where I made an error. And please, take your time. I used some statistical language, I wouldn't want to be guilty of gish galloping you.