5.53 Independent trials and the U.S. presidential election: Nate Silver is a statistician and journalist who uses statistics to create prediction tools. In an article leading up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election in which Barack Obama bested Mitt Romney, Silver (2012) explained his prediction methods as “principally, an Electoral College simulation, [which] therefore relies more heavily on state-by-state polls.” Consider Silver’s consolidation of data from polls across the 50 states. In what way are these polls likely to be independent trials? Why could someone argue that they are not truly independent trials?