Can Le Pen Win? Yes. Will She Win? No.

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On the eve of the French presidential election, an average of polls puts Emmanuel Macron ahead of Marine Le Pen, 61% to 39%. That's a massive gap.

To give some perspective, in Donald Trump's "upset" win in November, he beat the polls by only 2% in the popular vote. Le Pen will have to beat them by ten times that.

Nothing like that has ever happened in modern French politics. In the last eight presidential elections, the average polling error has been 4%, and the most the polls have ever been off was 8.4%. That was in 2002, when Jacques Chirac beat Marine's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 82% to 18%, a victory margin substantially larger then the polls had predicted.

An interesting article at FiveThirtyEight, points out that errors of 20% or more do happen occasionally. When Bernie Sanders upset Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic Primary, he beat the polls by 22%. Interestingly, that's exactly what Le Pen needs to do.

But such examples are extremely rare.

To do that, Le Pen will need a much higher number than predicted of deliberate abstentions - people who did not vote for Le Pen in the first round but refuse to cast a vote for Macron - along with getting an almost unheard of proportion of undecided voters to go her way and/or people doing the opposite of what they told pollsters. That this didn't happen in the first round - if anything, Le Pen slightly underperformed polls and expectations - does not bode well for Le Pen.

By almost all accounts, Le Pen did badly in the final debate, looking weirdly smug against a personable Macron. A last minute "dump" of hacked emails from the Macron campaign, allegedly containing all sorts of negative information - some of which the Macron campaign has declared to be falsified - came too late to matter, and may have even stirred up sympathy for Macron. It's essentially been embargoed by the French media, in any case. And, as of this writing, France is entering a twenty-four hour period in which all discussion and reporting on the election is prohibited by law.

Curiously, the prediction markets still give Le Pen a 15% or so chance of winning, a probability much higher than what her low standing in the polls should justify. The markets seem to know something that we don't, but what that is is unclear. It translates into Le Pen having an outside chance, not no chance but an outside chance - a chance equivalent to rolling a one on a six-sided die.

One in six.

Stranger things have happened.

But usually they don't.

BREAKING: "A man got out of a car and began shooting with a Kalashnikov on the Champs Elysees"

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Update (3:50 PM CST): The French police are now saying that there was only attacker. However, much of central Paris remains under lockdown.

Two policeman have been killed in a shooting earlier today on the Champs Elysees in Paris.

The incident occurred at approximately 9 PM local time, near a Marks and Spencer store at 104 Champs Elysees Avenue.

The gunman was shot dead. There are reports that there may be another gunman, presumably on the run.

The entire area has been blocked off and police are telling people to avoid it.  

Reuters quotes a witness: "A man got out of a car and began shooting (at police) with a Kalashnikov on the Champs Elysees."

A police spokesperson said the gunmen targeted police guarding the entrance to a subway station, and that the incident was a "likely" terror attack. 

Paris To Build $22 Million Anti-Terror Wall Around Eiffel Tower - "It's not a wall. It's an aesthetic perimeter."

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This is poignant: "Sadly, the risk of terrorism hasn't gone away."

When will it go away? What will make it go away? With the Muslim proportion of the population growing every year, will it ever go away?

From Bloomberg via Pamela Geller:

Paris is spending 20 million euros ($22 million) to build a protective barrier around the Eiffel Tower to replace temporary structures that were put up after a series of terror attacks. 

“Sadly, the risk of terrorism hasn’t gone away,” deputy mayor Jean-François Martins said at a Paris press conference. “It’s not a wall, it’s an aesthetic perimeter.” 

Martins wouldn’t confirm a report in Thursday’s Le Parisien newspaper that a clear glass structure would be built around the tower’s esplanade. The form the new structure takes will depend on solutions proposed in response to the city’s call for tenders, he said. 

Temporary and movable metal barriers were sporadically thrown up in 2015 and have been in place continuously since France hosted the Euro 2016 soccer championships last summer. 

The new perimeter will include the space under the tower, as well as two ponds on either side of it, an area roughly 200 by 300 meters. It must be able to stop bullets and vehicles, he said. Tourists will be free to enter the area after a security check, with payment required only to go up the Tower itself. 

Martins said he didn’t think the sight of yet another security measure in Paris -- where fully armed soldiers on patrol has become a common sight -- will deter tourists. “What scares tourists is lack of security, not security,” he said. The new structure will be the most visible and permanent change to the Paris landscape in response to terrorists.