Good to have a guess with a fairly big D wave win!
Very happy for you Wesley!
Aaaand the title change is done.
Again, well done Wesley Clark! Bear your title with pride.
I’ll start my own guess! With wins! And a fairly big D wave! In fact, forget the “wave”!
I didn’t follow the contest thread too closely.
To the winners: did you follow a system or know who would win or just take a lucky guess?
The short summary of how I pulled off the bronze - I didn’t pay attention to the special elections or who was President.
I put the most time thought into the House outcome. I looked at the generic ballot early in the election year. I assumed Trump would stay in the red on approval ratings; most of the post-WWII races had the President of the House majority party below water at election time. The generic ballot last Jan was a touch on the low side of a typical midterm. I lowered my House outcome from that typical wave to a smaller win for the party that was out of power as a result. I would have dropped a couple more D seats but I assumed wishful thinking from partisans at the Dope. I figured since the House was the bulk of scoring I’d tweak to the high side.
I didn’t overthink the Senate. I selected in Jan and historical patterns are tough to find since which chunk of the Senate is up for election matters. I gave the Democrats all the centrists incumbents in red states and assumed a couple pickups over at-risk GOP incumbents.
The vote percentage was based on historical midterm swings. I picked a touch on the lower end of typical. As the tiebreaker, I was picking away from what I expected to be partisan wishful thinking of other contestants.
Really that’s it. I ignored the Trump hype. I treated him like a generic President whose party was at slightly smaller than typical generic ballot disadvantage. The results turned out to be pretty typical. The only big difference from normal was both sides saw higher turnout.
Woot! I’m the most optimistic liberal!
I agree with President Trump. We should have stopped counting votes when I was winning! So unfair! Sad!
But congrats to Wesley Clark for the win, especially since he guessed way back in January!
Mine was basically a slightly optimistic guess based on Nate Silver’s median on the day before the election. At the time I picked, he had 232 House and about 48.5 Senate and by the end of the day the House was at 233.
But I did hit the percentage on the nose! Yay for me!
Yes, indeed. Yay for you!
Thanks again to everyone who participated. I enjoy these things and look forward to doing it again in 2020.
Wooo! #8!
Hahaha, I didn’t even know I won anything. I was in another thread and saw I had a different title.
Thanks.
How was this scored?
I will say that my best case scenario was democratic turnout was identical to a presidential year, which is about 60 million voters.
However I never suspected GOP turnout would be higher than 40 million, at absolute most 45 million. The GOP got 50 million votes. I didn’t see that coming at all.
Had the democrats won the election 60 to 40 million, they would’ve won way way more seats. I was predicting 50 million vs 40 million votes, best case scenario 60 vs 40 million. I never expected 60 vs 50 million.
Also a few days after the election I also predicted the democratic party could be a permanent minority party for the forseeable future due to gerrymandering and our system rewarding rural voters more than urban voters (democrats in the house won about the same number of seats by winning the popular vote by 8-9% in 2018 than the GOP did by losing the popular vote by 1% in 2012). So don’t get too excited about my predictions.
Missed being in the top 10 by 1. :smack:
Almost worst that missing it by a lot.
Congrats to Mr. Clark, and congrats to America.
Scoring was simple. You earned one point for each seat you were off in both the House and the Senate. Tie breaker - which didn’t come into play - was vote percentage. Lowest point total won. Well done!