A Look Back at my Election Predictions

Predictions:

House: D - 260, R - 175

Senate: D - 58, R- 40

Presidential EV: 368-170 Obama

Popular Vote: 53.6 to 45.1 Obama

Actual:

House: D - 257, R - 178

Senate: D - 57, R - 41 (assuming Franken wins)

Presidential EV: 365-173 Obama

Presidential PV: 52.9 to 45.7 Obama

Not too shabby. I was correct on every state except Montana, which was closer than expected. The pollsters did a pretty good job this year with all the variables they needed to take into account: the new voters, the cell phone effect, bradley effect, and the shy tory factor among others. I thought the cell phone effect would boost Obama up a little more than it did, but I was still within about 1 percentage point. I'm sure if I had confidence intervals (which I should have), the actual results would have been within them.

In the House and Senate races the republicans did a little better than expected. With Bush's favorablity rating hovering in the low 20s, it's pretty impressive how several of his supporters held onto their house seats. It's interesting that many of those who lost were on the moderate side, leaving mostly more conservative republicans left. I think this election as a whole indicates that Change was definitely desired, but the Democrats will need to show real progress in the next 2 and 4 years if they want to keep their command.

If you're interested, check out how the "expert" pundits did on predicting election. It was probably a lot of luck, but I did better than almost all of them.