We were going to wait for all results to be fully official before announcing our contest results (and awarding babka), but Joe “Norm Coleman” Miller seems to refuse to give it up (not even at the urging of Norm “Norm Coleman” Coleman).
Results were calculated as follows:
- For the two-way races, we asked you for a winner and a margin. We take the difference of your predicted margin and the real margin (including third party candidates), and add that to your “regular” score.
- For the three-way races, we asked you for the percentage each candidate was going to get. Again, we take the difference of your prediction and the actual percentage earned by the candidate, and add that to your “three-way” score.
- Your total score is the sum of the “regular” and “three way” scores, with a lower score being better.
- If you didn’t enter a margin/vote percentage (or we couldn’t understand what you entered), you got a “penalty” equal to the maximum score from a given race.
So a few summary statistics, by race:
- CT-Gov: 69% of you correctly guessed that Dan Malloy would win. Average margin was Malloy by 1.52%.
- OH-Gov: 57% of you correctly guessed that John Kasich would win. Average margin was Kasich by 1.53%.
- OR-Gov: 90% of you correctly guessed that John Kitzhaber would win, on average by 3.39%.
- CO-Sen: 57% of you correctly guessed that Michael Bennet would win. However, the average margin was Ken Buck by 0.40%
- NV-Sen: 66% of you correctly guessed that Harry Reid would win, on average by 0.30%.
- WI-Sen: 91% of you correctly guessed that Ron Johnson would win, on average by 5.17%.
- FL-25: Only 47% of you guessed that David Rivera would win, but the average predicted margin was Rivera by 0.45%.
- PA-07: 75% of you correctly guessed that Pat Meehan would win, by 2.96% on average.
- VA-11: 79% of you guessed that Gerry Connolly would win, and correctly so; the average predicted margin was 2.81%.
In the three-way races:
- MN-Gov: Average prediction was Dayton 44.45; Emmer 39.68; Horner 14.75.
- AK-Sen: Average prediction was McAdams 31.88; Miller 33.36; Murkowski 33.62.
This could almost be a testament to the wisdom of crowds (…or alternatively, the central limit theorem) – as a collective whole, only one race would have been called incorrectly. If averages were an entry, it would have placed 21st.
So, of course, having done our best Census Bureau impression (at least we haven’t congratulated ourselves excessively!) – who won?
itskevin, abgin, and UpstateNYer come on down! (And by “come on down”, I mean “email DavidNYC with contact information” …) Sidenote: remember, you had to have submitted your entries before 5pm EDT on Election Day – and had (and still have) a valid account at the time of announcement of contest.
Full results are available here. Thanks to everyone who participated!
If you didn’t win, don’t worry, there may or may not be a prediction contest for the Chicago mayoral race, too. I see David’s babka and raise him one deep dish. That, or some dead fish wrapped in a copy of the Trib, depending on how we feel.
along with my informed guesses. Congrats to the winners.
A request: would you guys mind adding a “rank” column to the far left? Thanks.
Looks like I’m in about the 40th percentile, about. WI-Sen and VA-11 killed me in scoring.
Congrats to our three winners!
I don’t get a score. #VALUE FTW!
Even though I did poorly because I nailed a few races.
I was pretty good in the 2 way races – it was the 3 ways that killed me. Should’ve remembered that the large minority of voters who always vote for the MIP will put ANY Minnesota race within a gnat’s wing between the two real candidates, even when one of them is an assclown of Emmer proportions. And I totally blew Alaska – believed the McAdams hype because I didn’t think Murkowski could win a write-in campaign.
Oh well. Congrats to the people who owned.
that’s embarrassing…
I’ll be proud to have cracked the top 10%. I did about that well in 2009: hopefully one year I’ll get the babka!
A skipped answer or something?
Out of 154. Pretty good. In the November 2009 contest, I did not do as well.
Apologies for that. I didn’t think the first effort had gone thru properly. Obviously it did.
Without it, I’d have perhaps even fallen below the #100 mark. So, thanks, Lisa.
The consensus forecast usually beats most of the individual forecasts whether people are looking at the economy, football, or anything else. The same thing happened here. The consensus would have been 21st out of 154.
My numbers finally work so well 🙂
Thank you 🙂
what my calls were, just that I was essentially winging it. Still, I’ll take it! 🙂
Not too great either considering predicting elections is my hobby, but hey, everyone on SSP is a politics junkie, so what.
Looking at it, almost all of my error was contributed by FL-25 and MN-SEN. I was on-par with the top 5 on the other races, just that I thought that Garcia would be able to stem the tide and that I thought that Horner would get to 20 at Emmer’s expense.
These are noteworthy because they are the first in the MS legislature since the election. I believe this ties the MS State Senate but that body is already run by a conservative coalition.
http://majorityinms.com/2010/1…
I finished in the top third. After the election it felt like I called so many of those races wrong.
Johannes deserves a special shout-out–he did well in the SSP election prediction contest (17th out of more than 150 entries) and won the Bleeding Heartland contest even though it’s been five years since he’s lived in Iowa.
Looks like Christmas came late this year, have to say I was pretty surprised at this. Pretty excited since I don’t think I’ve ever had any babka
43 isn’t good but not horrible. Though I will brag about Hoosierdem’s doomsday house predicts. I predicted 64 gone, we actually lost 63. Not babka worthy though. 🙁 Congrats to all the winners!
I don’t know if anyone ever suggested this, but maybe you should have a small penalty for picking the wrong winner. When a race is supertight, you shouldn’t get more credit for picking the loser by 2 than the winner by 3 or 4 in my opinion. Maybe just a one point penalty. It actually helped me that there was none, but it also surprised me that I was #28, because I knew I blew a couple of calls.
Beat the crowd, I’ll take that.