I made it into the top 10! After the first results, it looked like my guess was well into the bottom half, but all that counting vastly improved it. Yay! And congrats to the winner!
And I’m pleased (and relieved!) to see that it appears that liberal Dopers had a better grasp of electoral reality for the 2018 cycle than conservative Dopers, at least in this contest.
Are you going by the results above? Because I’m fairly certain only UltraVires would qualify on this board as a conservative among the bottom guessers. Aspenglow and BobLibDem look to have been overly optimistic liberals, Sherred and pjacks overly pessimistic liberals.
Not just those, but my understanding of the overall results, in which (based on my reading) no conservative Dopers got close to the correct results, while several liberal Dopers did.
When I get home tonight I’ll post the entire results. Some of them are interesting. And the finish was tight. I think that without CA-21 going D Wesley Clark wouldn’t have won.
Thanks! I know I didn’t make the Top Ten, but I also didn’t make the Bottom Five. I’ll wait to find out just how bad my prognostications actually were.
The worst results were 4 liberal Dopers and one conservative. At least 4 of the top ten, I really don’t know. You shouldn’t be particularly pleased that a board that’s about 80% Democrats had Democrats in the top ten guesses.
It could be that a lot of people were making guesses based on their own ideological views and it just happened that the nation’s voting patterns were more liberal than conservative this election.
It’s like asking fans of two opposing football teams which of their teams will win an upcoming game. Both groups of fans will generally predict their own team’s victory. But the half that are subsequently proven correct weren’t any better at analyzing the game than the half that guessed wrong.
It doesn’t really mean anything, but by my understanding of the board members who chose to participate, the handful of conservatives among them are clustered towards the bottom of those final standings (with maybe 1 or 2 in the middle, depending on who counts as conservative). And I could be missing a few, of course, since I’m not positive about the politics of everyone. It’s a silly and mostly meaningless victory to celebrate, but I’ll celebrate it nonetheless!
Except we were also asked to predict the final score. And maybe the person who came really close to predicting the score knows a little more than everybody else.
But are you a conservative? If so, are you a Trumper? If not, then I’ll amend my statement to Trumpers and anti-Trumpers. Not that it matters either way.
When we avoid the common treatment of conservative as being synonymous with Republican, I’m moderate or centrist. I’m decidedly not a Trumper.
Little_Nemo’s point about picking what you wish probably has a lot of bearing. I’ve never been all that partisan. The last 3 years have seen both parties actively running away from my vote while partisans on both sides line up to demonize me. Being dispassionate came pretty easily.
I had hoped for a much larger knock-on effect from a blue wave that would overwhelm the gerrymandering, but I was wrong.
