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How Did I Do?

It is once again accountability time at Eunomia.  I made some wild and crazy predictions before the election, and it is time to check to see just how well or badly I did.  Certainly in terms of the size of the “wave” I did all right, though I expected a few more pickups.   I was closest on […]

It is once again accountability time at Eunomia.  I made some wild and crazy predictions before the election, and it is time to check to see just how well or badly I did.  Certainly in terms of the size of the “wave” I did all right, though I expected a few more pickups.   I was closest on the Senate with my 52-48 pick, which was only one off (and Ford made a decent showing that suggests my belief in a sweep wasn’t completely crazy). 

However, as we get down to the nitty-gritty of the House races the Dems actually won I did rather less well.  In my first 13, the seats I assumed were guaranteed to go Democratic, I got 13/13 right.  No major points there, since a blind man could have seen the outcome of these races.  Then it gets a bit less impressive.  My second group consisted of the following:

NM-01, AZ-05, ID-01, IA-01, KY-03, MN-06, NH-02, OH-02, OH-01, PA-07, PA-06, KY-04, IL-06, FL-13, CT-02, CT-04, CT-05

My Ohio and Minnesota picks were apparently very foolish, as were my picks of CT-04, FL-13, ID-01, IL-06, KY-04 and NM-01.  Gutknecht ended up losing, while Michelle “Fool for Christ” Bachmann pulled away (in fairness, all polling showed Bachmann winning that race–I was trying to be too clever by half).  I know that NM-01 hasn’t been officially called for Wilson, and Madrid could theoretically make a comeback in the count, but I don’t buy it, even if the votes are coming in from Sandoval and Santa Fe counties, which ought to go for Madrid in a big way.  Wilson has strange voodoo powers that prevent her from losing elections.  (To date, she has never lost a race.)  The reason for my mistakes here falls into the Wishful Thinking category.  I really wanted Roskam and Wilson to lose, for example, and kept ignoring their advantages late in the race. 

The one I am proudest of is KY-03, which relatively few people saw coming (I took Chuck Todd’s word on this one).  I never saw IA-02 or NH-01 coming, and I didn’t think Shaw would lose in FL-22.  Pennsylvania was bloodier than Ohio, strangely enough (perhaps a side-effect of Santorum’s debacle?), and NY-19 was a somewhat unexpected GOP loss that I considered calling for the Dems but couldn’t justify.  In this second group, I scored only 8/17.  Ouch.

In my third group of wild card pickups, I didn’t do much better:

NE-03, KS-02, NY-29, NY-26, NY-20 

Reynolds and Kuhl won in New York, and Kleeb was unable to pull off the highly improbable upset.  I am pleased to have seen KS-02 coming almost a month ago, which I don’t think most people would have been willing to call for the Dems before the election.  Sweeney’s seat was almost a gimme after the domestic abuse story took over the campaign in the final days.  Still, that’s only 2/5 for a grand total of 23 out of 35 right.  So I got roughly two-thirds of my predictions in the House right, which isn’t actually all that great.

Senate predictions are easier if you think there will be a “wave”–pick one side across the board and ignore all contradictory information.  Ford seemed to be hanging tough and I thought he could pull out a squeaker, but apparently he could not.

So my powers of prediction aren’t terrific, though I would note that most of what happened was pretty foreseeable and was foreseen by people paying attention to those dreaded polls.  A lot of the last-minute desperation talk from Republican pundits that “the only poll that matters” on Election Day would tell us what the electorate was really thinking became very annoying very quickly.  Obviously an election is the “only poll that matters,” but how sad was it that, even as they were taking hope in some of those late generic polls that they might survive, they simply refused to believe what every poll was saying?  How sad was it to hear people talk about the great Santorum comeback only days before Tuesday when he ended up losing by 18?  In that race, all polling actually underestimated how badly he would lose, but it told us that he would lose badly and it was right.  Polls have all kinds of flaws (especially Zogby polling, which showed Madrid up by some insane number, and Duckworth winning by double digits when both seem to have lost–his operation is evidently deeply flawed), and they are not anything close to an “exact science,” but people have been doing them for long enough that most of the kinks have been worked out in most polls.  They are trustworthy to a certain degree, and they can be relied upon.  Obviously, I would have had no chance of making my predictions had there not been fairly accurate and reliable polling in all of these races.  It was the polling that was clearly wildly off and suspect (often Zogby polling) that encouraged me in my delusions that, for instance, DuPage County would ever elect a Democrat to Congress and that Scott Kleeb was winning in Nebraska.  Had I paid more attention to the consensus of all the polling, rather than betting on the strange and weird numbers coming from some polling operations (SurveyUSA also put out some pretty questionable stuff), I would have done a lot better.

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