The Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest: 2008 Results!

At long last, we’ve finally crunched the numbers on the 2008 edition of the Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest. Without further ado (and remember, the lower the score, the better), the winners are:






















Place User Score
1 ahfdemocrat 59
T-2 Englishlefty 60
T-2 Tyler Oakley 60

What a photo finish – the next-closest score was 61! Congratulations to all our winners, and our deepest thanks to everyone who participated. We had over 110 entrants – double the number from two years ago.

If you’re a winner, please email me so that I can send you some delicious chocolate babka, as promised (and check out Wikipedia to learn more about this wondrous treat, including the famous Seinfeld episode). Now, since I’ve been an utter bum and never managed to send prizes to the 2006 winners, all the previous victors (Democraticavenger, tyler, DCal and Craig) can also email me to collect. And if this year’s runner up Tyler Oakley is the same person as “tyler” from two years ago, then that’ll mean a double helping of babka!

If you’re curious to see how you fared, I’ve uploaded a complete spreadsheet here. Note that I didn’t compute the tiebreak as it wasn’t necessary, but you can find those guesses on the third tab. (Also, a few users failed to offer predictions for all fourteen races or entered their results too late and thus aren’t on this spreadsheet – sorry!) And here’s how the community predicted things as a whole:













































































Race SSP Avg. Actual
WA-Gov 4 6
AK-Sen 10 1
MS-Sen-B -5 -10
CA-46 -5 -10
FL-25 1 -6
LA-01 -13 -31
NE-02 -1 -4
NH-01 6 6
NM-02 4 12
NY-13 18 28
OH-02 -3 -7
PA-11 -2 3
TX-22 -6 -7
WY-AL -1 -10

I’ll leave it to you guys to grouse over where we missed things and why. In any event, thanks once again to everyone who submitted predictions, and we look forward to doing this again in two years’ time!

37 thoughts on “The Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest: 2008 Results!”

  1. I got a 78! I beat both the mean & median averages by double digits. Hmmm, not bad for a somewhat novice who first got a DKos account in 2005. 😉

  6. I was a little too optimistic for Team Blue (and my picks closely mirror the SSP average).  I was off in favor of the Democrat on 10 races and in favor of the Republican in 4.  On average, my predictions were 3 points too optimistic for the Democrats.

    Not sure what I was thinking in LA-01.  I took a 21 points in that race alone!

  7. was the one that would have killed me. I would have thought that it would be close again, but I understand what held Wulsin back.

    But still –seven points? Ouch.

    Oh, well.

  8. I lost 33 points on LA-1 and AK-Sen and 39 on all the others combined.

    I didn’t win, but I learned something very valuable about the states of Louisiana and Alaska thanks, in part, to The Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest.

    Thanks DavidNYC.

  9. Not too shabby, I guess, but why the hell was I drinking the Jim Harlan kool-aid?  I might have won this thing if I put down a rational answer for LA-01.  Then again, so would several people I’m sure.

    Seriously, why were we pretending he was a vaguely credible candidate?

  11. I think that’s pretty good, with 30 points just from LA-01 and NY-13. Don’t underrestimate the landslide possibilities…

  12. what a chocolate babka would have meant to this Iowan in the middle of winter.

    But actually, it’s just as well, because I need to lose 10 pounds.

    I’m mainly annoyed that I didn’t beat the median.

  13. that I never got around to posting the results from Bleeding Heartland’s much smaller election prediction contest. I had to wait several weeks for recount results in a couple of statehouse districts, and then I forgot. So this jogged my memory.

    Our overall winner got several of her predictions exactly right. Populista did pretty well too, but unfortunately Bleeding Heartland’s resident troll was the closest on the IA-04 and IA-05 races:

    http://www.bleedingheartland.c…

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