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The Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest: 2008 Results!

by: DavidNYC

Mon Dec 29, 2008 at 12:00 PM EST


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!
DavidNYC :: The Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest: 2008 Results!
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The Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest: 2008 Results! | 37 comments
Whoo-hoo!
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. ;-)

Yes, Virginia, there ARE progressives in Nevada!
24, gay male, Democrat, NV-03 (or 04?)
Darn it
Forgot to do NH-1.  
Whoops...
How much did that hurt your final score? That must be frustrating.

Yes, Virginia, there ARE progressives in Nevada!
24, gay male, Democrat, NV-03 (or 04?)
[ Parent ]
Sorry about that :(
The problem is that leaving off a race only helps your final score - the fewer races you try to predict, the fewer total points (remember, lower is better) you're like to amass. There didn't seem to be any fair way to adjust for this apart from not counting the deficient entries entirely.

I'm sure this is small comfort, but I don't think any of the folks who left out a race were in the running for the top three. But please try again in 2010!

[ Parent ]
Yeah...
Totally my fault.
[ Parent ]
Does being from the UK make my score better?
Or just sad? :)
I got 84
and beat both the average and the median. Not too shabby.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
I feel the same way
I was not spectacular, but solidly above average (i.e. didn't embarass myself like I typically do in college basketball pools!).
[ Parent ]
Hey
wasn't MN-Senate supposed to be the tie breaker?  hahahahaha, ironic....
Heh, ironic indeed
But that's why we chose it. I mean, we had no idea, of course, that things would unfold as they have. But the polling had been so super-tight for so long (plus the race had the added wrinkle of a third-party candidate likely to pull double digits) that we thought it would be a nice, challenging race to use as a tiebreak. I think in 2006 we did TX-Gov for somewhat similar reasons (crazy four-way race).
[ Parent ]
heh, ironically, I got the tiebreaker nearly spot on, IIRC
I predicted a 43-42-15 Franken win.  Of course, that didn't help...I got a 107 otherwise.  I was WAY too optimistic on some of these contests.

party: Democratic, ideology: moderate, district: CT-01
[ Parent ]
Very Average 87
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!

OH-02
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.

Man....
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.

77
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?

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
LA-01
and NC-10 were the two races I thought everyone was on crack for thinking about.  

Granted, I was all over MN-2 for a lot time there...  And I never thought Franken would win.  MN Senate, what a doozy of a race.  Should go down in history as the biggest headache race for both parties ever.

[ Parent ]
wait, hahaha
I guessed R+13 on LA-01, which was the average and far from R+31.  Hahahaha, I did drink the kool aid.
[ Parent ]
I totally did too.
I thought he'd get within like fifteen points or so.  I think my guess was R+12.

party: Democratic, ideology: moderate, district: CT-01
[ Parent ]
Bleh. 82.
Seeing as one race gave me 20 points I suppose that isn't bad.  
A 70 for me
I think that's pretty good, with 30 points just from LA-01 and NY-13. Don't underrestimate the landslide possibilities...

33, living in Germany  
you people have no idea
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.

thanks for reminding me
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...

Yayayay!
Email sent.
Tied for 8th, not bad
Beat the average by 24 points.  Glad I didn't drink the kool-aid on LA-01 as badly as many others, though I was still way off there.
Same with me.
I never believed that district, which is probably one of the most Republican in the country, would be even remotely competitive. Ditto NC-10.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
Well, it could be within twenty points if there actually were a Democratic wave.
And that's one way I realized that there wasn't.  It was just a presidential-level Obama wave.

party: Democratic, ideology: moderate, district: CT-01
[ Parent ]
It was a wave
21 house seats (24 for the year) and 8 senate seats (we only took 6 in 2006) qualifies as a wave in my book.  Ya, I know repubs had a lot of retirements, but we still took out plenty of incumbents.  Could have been a bigger wave, but it was a wave still.

I also have a hard time believing that looking at LA-01 results can tell anyone anything about whether we had a good year.  That's almost as bad as looking at Dem performance in a Queens, NY or San Francisco district and determining Dems had a bad year because the candidate took only 80% of the vote instead of the usual 85-90%.

[ Parent ]
No, what I meant by a "wave" is
some sort of overwhelming lean of the entire electorate in one direction or the other.  In those terms, if there were a Democratic wave, that would mean that the Republican brand is so toxic that even many hardcore Republicans would start questioning whether they should vote for their party's nominee.

In that sense, there was no wave, either anti-Republican/pro-Democrat, or anti-incumbent.  Mike Enzi (WY-Sen-R) beat Chris Rothfuss 76-24, and John Kerry (MA-Sen-D) beat Jeff Beatty 66-31.  In a Democratic wave year, I would expect to see the generic Democrat in Wyoming get some 37% or more of the vote, or something like that.  Using the past two elections to determine PVI, it seems that Wyoming's PVI of R+19 means that its "baseline" is about 69-31 Republican; a wave would have put the Democrat up by several points (or perhaps at least going as far as the baseline itself, when considering a popular incumbent).

As far as Senate and House races go, I don't think there was a wave, and no matter what the quantity of flipped seats dictates, we have to compare that to the "baseline".  We were expecting Democratic flips in a number of districts already: VA-Sen, NM-Sen, NY-13, AZ-01, etc. that were all based on various not-really-partisan factors, such as the quality of candidates and changing demographics and Republican retirements.  There was a slight tide in the Democrats' favor in the Senate, which helped carry over candidates like Jeff Merkley and Kay Hagan, but if there were a wave in the Senate, Ted Stevens would not have been teetering on the brink of victory at the end of an initial count, in my opinion; he'd have been defeated soundly.

In the House, we were easily expected to win some 15 Republican seats or so, and the Republicans were expected to win one or two of our seats (FL-16 definitely, TX-22 maybe).  We won another 10-15 on top of those (and lost 4 of our own seats).  If there were a Democratic wave, I would have predicted another 15-20 seat gain.  TX-22, KS-02, and maybe LA-06 wouldn't have flipped R; on the other hand, I think we would have taken seats like MN-06, CA-44, FL-25.  Of course, exactly which seats we might have captured depends on the particular state and the circumstances surrounding it (for example, our taking both MI-07 and MI-09 is partly attributable to the Republicans giving up on the state at the presidential level).

But in that regard, I have to say either there wasn't much of a wave, or the Republicans played defense really darn well.  Probably some of both, but I don't think there was much of a wave, and that that was a large part of it.

party: Democratic, ideology: moderate, district: CT-01

[ Parent ]
What you're thinking of is a tsunami.
Picking up 20+ House seats and 8 (prob) Senate seats is most def a wave.  
[ Parent ]
1994 was a tsunami
2006 and 2008 were waves. 2002 and 2004 were a piss in the ocean.  
[ Parent ]
Really?
Dems picked up 8 Senate seats this year, 4 of which were inumbents we defeated.  In 1994 republicans picked up the exact same number of Senate seats, only 2 of which were incumbent losses.  Though they did gain Shelby and Campbell post election party switchers.

Our Senate gains this year were more impressive than repubs in 1994, though they did gain far more house seats that year, as well as manym ore Governorships (though there were very few of those decided this year).

[ Parent ]
I'd call 50 plus House gains a tsunami
Dems were never getting anywhere near those numbers in either of the last couple cycles.
[ Parent ]
More of a two-cycle tsunami
I think we had a lot of carry-over this year from 2006.  Net effect was +54 house seats (counting 3 specials), +14 senate seats and +7 Governorships.

Ironically I believe 54 seats that we gained between 2006 and 2008 is the exact number of seats repubs gained in 1994.

[ Parent ]
I bet it's nowhere near the SAME house seats though
And that's a key difference.

Also I'll concede a "slow wave".

Then again, to be honest, I was expecting some sort of election year that would make 2006 pale in comparison.  We DID win more Senate seats than we did last time, but we won slight fewer House seats, and I was expecting us to win about the same number, if not more.

party: Democratic, ideology: moderate, district: CT-01

[ Parent ]
Almost top 10!!!
#11!!  Next year, it'll be #1, I can feel it.

16, Male, MI-01
I'm shocked
Complete fluke on my part.
Don't worry, it was consistent with my predictions on my predictions
As always, my predictions are WAYYYY off.

party: Democratic, ideology: moderate, district: CT-01
[ Parent ]
The Great Swing State Project Predictions Contest: 2008 Results! | 37 comments

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