My Election Predictions: They Were Pretty Awesome

I made a prediction in all 51 Presidential state-level contests and all 33 Senate contests that were held last night. Of those 84 races, I was correct in 82 of them, including going 51-for-51 at the Presidential level. I correctly called 332 Obama, 206 Romney as the final electoral tally, with Obama winning all his 2008 states except Indiana, North Carolina, and Omaha's single elector, but winning everything else, including Florida. I also correctly predicted 55 Democratic Senators, assuming Angus King does the obvious thing regarding caucus choice. My only errors were in North Dakota, where I was honestly a bit surprised that Heidi Heitkamp managed to pull it out, and Nevada, where I thought the legendary Democratic turnout machine would deliver a victory for Shelley Berkley. I was wrong as to both of those, but they canceled out in terms of overall partisan balance.

My predictions compare very well to Nate Silver's. Like me, he nailed the Presidential race, even having Florida as pretty much a tie with Obama the narrow victor. Like me, he got two Senate races wrong, both in the west. Unlike me, however, he did not call the final Senate balance of power correctly, because his errors did not cancel out; he had Heitkamp losing in ND, but also had Jon Tester losing re-election in Montana. I had observed a while back that ND and MT were two very sparsely-polled Senate contests, and the FiveThirtyEight model was giving an awful lot of weight to the "state fundamentals" in them. In other words, Nate's model was assuming that the state partisan gravity would assert itself rather strongly against polling that suggested really close races. I was always a bit skeptical that it would, and indeed it didn't. In fact, the reason for thinking Berkley would win in NV was that the state's partisan gravity would outweigh the rather substantial volume of polling in that state. I'm a bit embarrassed, in retrospect, to have bought into that, although the fact that it has happened before in that state makes it a bit more understandable. Overall, however, Nate and I and really anyone who was willing to take the polls at face value did really well in forecasting the state-level contests.

One thing to mention, by way of tooting my own horn, is that I've been saying for at least ten or eleven months now that I thought the Senate races would go very well. Specifically, since Olympia Snowe's retirement I've been pretty damn confident we'd hold the Senate, and even before than I thought it was pretty likely. So I've been correctly predicting what happened last night since a time when pretty much everyone thought we were going to lose control of the chamber. I don't remember if I wrote a blog post to that effect, but I definitely have been saying it in person to my friends and family. Part of why is that the Republican tendency to throw away multiple winnable races per cycle has just become, in my opinion, predictable at this point, so I was always sort of assuming from the start that stuff like that which occurred in Indiana and Missouri would happen somewhere. And I enter the 2014 prediction season, which I admit is looking to be a bloodbath at the Senate level, with that same assumption in mind. I don't know where the Republicans will cough up winnable seats, but I'm pretty sure that they will do it somewhere.

Another thing I'd say is that my method seems to have been pretty well vindicated. That method, specifically, is to get all my polling data from looking at what PublicPolicyPolling says, and what FiveThirtyEight says. Both sources aced the election; many other sources bungled it rather badly. PPP are just clearly the best in the polling game right now, and Nate does the best job I know of at taking the vast bulk of less-awesome polling data and turning it into a useful commodity. I plan on continuing this method going forward, and I expect to continue being vindicated in it.

As for the House...? Well, I'm a bit surprised that Democratic gains were that meager, or maybe disappointed is a better word than surprised, because this was always what people were saying. It looks right now like we might get circa 200 seats when all's said and done, leaving us with a further 18 to take back the House in future elections.

But on the whole, given that my predictions were pretty good ones, it's good to be right.

Forthcoming later today will be a piece of general reactions to the election, and then a piece previewing the next couple of years, both of which could be very long. It's snowing right now, just the perfect little icing (literally!) on the cake of the past 24 hours, so I might not get to them for a while; staring out the window at the snow takes precedence. But they will get written.