November 18, 2012

The 2012 Election is Finally Over! So Who Won the Forecasting Contest?

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Ron Barber won the AZ-2 House race today, and with that I believe the 2012 election is over. Final results:

  • President: Obama 332, Romney 206
  • House: 201 D, 234 R
  • Senate: 55 D/I, 45 R

So how did Sam Wang, our resident expert do? Answer: pretty well. A month before the election, he called the presidential race dead on and missed the Senate race by only one seat. His House prediction was off by 16 seats, but in fairness, he was in the middle of incorporating redistricting/incumbency effects when I asked him for his forecast on October 6, and he warned me that this might change things. His later forecast was considerably more accurate.

Still, the rules were best forecast a month ahead of the election. So who won? Here are all the commenters who got the presidential split correct:

Jeff Gauvin

  • President: Obama 332, Romney 206
  • House: 215 D, 220 R
  • Senate: 52 D/I, 48 R

Ziggy

  • President: Obama 332, Romney 206
  • House: 215 D, 220 R
  • Senate: 54 D/I, 46 R

Jason Broccardo

  • President: Obama 332, Romney 206
  • House: 215 D, 220 R
  • Senate: 56 D/I, 44 R

jharp

  • President: Obama 332, Romney 206
  • House: 215 D, 220 R
  • Senate: 55 D/I, 45 R

Oddly, all four predicted an identical House split, so the winner is jharp, who got the Senate split dead on. However, there’s an honorable mention co-winner too:

Kadzimiel

  • President: Obama 303, Romney 235
  • House: 202 D, 233 R
  • Senate: 55 D/I, 45 R

Kadzimiel was almost dead-on for both the House and Senate, and missed the presidential split only by Florida, which was a genuine nail-biter that could have gone either way.

So that’s that. The 2012 election is in the books. Kadzimiel and jharp are co-winners of the forecasting contest, and if you guys will send me your email addresses I’ll try to persuade the powers-that-be to sign you up for a free MoJo subscription for 2013. Congratulations!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

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