Results

Election Prediction Results:

1) Obama wins by a pretty good margin

Obama won by 7% or so and won over 2-1 in the electoral college. This was a very safe bet though, as a lot of betting sites had Obama at 1:12 or even better prior to the election.

2) Obama wins Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, PA, New Hampshire and the rest of the NE states (WV is the only state north of VA and east of IN that McCain wins).

I was right on all of these predictions, but I left out NC (likely Obama) and Indiana (Obama won narrowly).

3) I think McCain will squeek out North Carolina.

I was wrong here, looks like Obama squeeked it out, 50-49, or by less than 14k votes out of more than 4.2 million votes in the state.

4) I want to say McCain will win Florida by a hair as well, but I'm going to predict Obama wins Florida by less than 2 points.

Obama won Florida by 2 pts. I thought the anti gay marriage initiative would give McCain more support than it did, or maybe the Gore/Clinton campaigning combined with the advertising advantage Obama had just really counteracted that and then some.

I recall Hillary Clinton making the claim that Obama had no chance in Florida if he would be the nominee vs McCain and most pundits agreed. Turns out about 99% of the arguments the Clinton campaign made in the primaries were bullshit. Obama crushed PA, OH, won FL by 2 and was very competitive in western states Hillary could not dream of competing in.

5) Obama loses Indiana by less than 3 pts, comes within 5 pts of taking Arizona, McCain's home state.

Obama actually wins Indiana by 26k votes, or less than 1% I believe. Mccain wins Arizona by 9 points. Very surpising to me that Obama takes Indiana and gets trounced in AZ, he was pushing ads in AZ up to the election day and the demographics of the state have improved mightily for Democrats in recent years. Yes, I realize Indiana is Obama's neighboring state, and the organization was crazy huge in the Gary/Northwest Indiana areas, and that McCain is from AZ, but the former I still didn't think would be enough for Obama and the latter I thought the ads and polls were a sure sign Obama was competitive (not to mention NV and NM went Obama pretty solidly).

6) Election is called after Obama wins Virginia and Pennslyvannia (I'm not sure on this one, some polls may close before others, like if Obama won Virginia, Florida and OH and PA wasn't announced yet, most people would likely call it for Obama).

I think it was after Virginia, though the networks could've called it after Ohio/PA were called earlier. I think I was right on this one, but I'm not positive.



Conclusion: I think I did a good job of predicting the results. I didn't nail them on the head and I don't give myself a ton of credit bc I think this was a very very predictive election according to the polls (I've been following the polls on many sites, especially fivethirtyeight.com, though also realclearpolitics and pollster.com).

I'm not going to get into my personal views on the election or anything, I'm sure a lot of people are tired of hearing how everyone feels about this, but I am happy Obama won. I definitely preferred him over Hillary and most other democratic challengers, and while I liked McCain more than any other GOP candidate and some democratic ones, campaigning has never been his forte, and neither has leading or working with large groups of people. He seems to be good at micromanaging one or two reform things at a time and getting shit done that way, I also respect him for his ability to stand up to the traditional right wing of his party throughout his career in the Senate.

Meh, I guess I did share some of my views.