NEW YORK—Saying the forecast method had an extremely high degree of accuracy, political statistician Nate Silver announced Monday he had projected the results of Super Tuesday’s presidential primary elections using a microscopic U.S. electorate he had grown in a petri dish. “By growing a colony of 146 million micrometer-tall Americans in the FiveThirtyEight lab and subjecting them to a variety of electoral variables, I’ve been able to predict the outcomes of all 13 primaries and caucuses that will be contested on Super Tuesday,” wrote Silver in a post on his website, explaining that he had been careful to cultivate the voter population in a nutrient-rich agar medium so it was demographically identical to that of the United States, just at 1/2,000,000th the size. “At that scale, election cycles progress approximately 4,000 times faster than in our environment, which allowed me to run hundreds of iterations of Super Tuesday on the microscopic electorate, varying such factors as last-minute political endorsements and the temperature in various regions on voting day with each individual test. This has yielded a high level of certainty about how Americans will vote tomorrow, and I can say that in 91 percent of all scenarios, microscopic Donald Trump had a very big day.” Silver added that, based on his experiment, there was a roughly 3 percent chance that the Super Tuesday results would polarize the electorate to such a degree that they would begin attacking one another and attempting to feast on the others’ stores of sugar.

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