James Fallows: Accountability Watch: Who is Predicting What 1) Let’s talk with these people in a few days. A number of people whose claim to public attention is that they know about politics are flatly predicting a blow-out win for Mitt Romney tomorrow. …
George Will: 321-217 electoral vote landslide for Romney
Michael Barone: 315-223 for Romney
Dick Morris: "a landslide"
Karl Rove: "at least" 279 for Romney, meaning at most 259 for Obama
Joe Scarborough: close race with Romney in a better position.
Charles Krauthammer: a "very close" win for Romney, which means 270 electoral votes or just above
Peggy Noonan, "a [Romney] win"
Remember, these people’s claim to fame – especially in the case of (in their respective primes) Barone, Morris, and Rove – is that they know something special about politics. If they are putting their names behind these predictions, presumably they would like us to take them seriously. We’ll see what happens in the next day or two: If they are right, all appropriate credit. But if they are not, this should be remembered, rather than just blown off. And similarly, if the “quants” who are unanimously predictable a sizable Obama win prove to be wrong, they should be made to explain.* Fallows says that he doesn’t make a prediction because that’s not his specialty. I think that’s fair and laudable.
A majority of Avast users favor Romney. A majority of Avast users think Obama will win. Apparently that 2nd question has historically been a decent predictor of victory. Electoral map with those results at the Fallows link.
Me: Oh the quants will explain, whether they are made to or not. These are reality-based guys, not cheerleaders.
I’ll go on record with 303 for Obama and 235 for Romney. Swing or technically-swing states for Obama: Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire. Romney gets Florida and North Carolina. I can see other people picked this and I think it’s rated as one of the most likely outcomes or the most likely outcome, so hopefully being right will make up for the fact that I’m not picking anything unusual or bold.
…Given my perspective, it was an easy case to call. A few months back I published my findings in The Death of Liberalism. In that book I noted that in the conservative deluge of 2010 independents combined with conservatives to turn the Liberals out. …Along with the conservatives and independents, next week will come the “uncommitted” voter. The uncommitted always goes with the challenger. Tyrrell hits all 3 bases: over-emphasis on a mid-year election, obliviousness to Republicans rebranding themselves as independents and an unsubstantiated claim about undecideds breaking for the challenger.
Obama secured 332 electoral votes, though Florida was pretty close. I was 29 points off. Slate Magazine provides a helpful pundit scorecard. Nate has a nice post showing voting margins for each state: he keeps New York Times readers well informed.
Say Romney won Florida (very plausible), Ohio, Virginia and Colorado. Then he would have won the election with 275 votes to Obama’s 263. That forecast would have been 69 EV off. Now actually Obama’s margin in Colorado was a comfortable 4.7%. But whose forecasts were worse than that scenario?
Hall of Flames
Karl Rove: 73 EV off the mark.
Andy Bayer of the Washington Post: 78EV error
Newt Gingrich: 94EV off: Ouch!
Dean Chambers, Unskewed Polls, 105EV skewed up
Jim Cramer, MSNBC: Predicts Obama blowout with 108EV off the charts
Michael Barone, National Review: 109EV off
George Will, Washington Post: 115EV in fantasy land
Dick Morris: 119EV in his own world
Chambers was an amateur blogger, so I’ll give him a pass though I laugh at those who took him seriously. But he manned up and gave TPM an interview. He also apologized for some of his buffoonery, which is to be encouraged. The politicos were predictably biased. Andrew Beyer, Horse Racing columnist, at least isn’t a political pundit.
As for the remainder -Jim Cramer, Michael Barone, George Will and Dick Morris- they are clowns. Pending evidence that they have updated their beliefs – marked them to market as it were – their views should be ignored and their viewers acknowledged to be fools.
Wow, so close! I’m really surprised but also pleased that Obama got Florida. After the torture of being in limbo for so long in 2004, it’s nice to have an election that was pretty much in line with predictions
Josh Jordan of the National Review predicted a Romney win, 295 to 243. That placed him 89EV off, almost as bad as Newt Gingrch. In addition to Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Jordan believed that Romney would win Iowa (+5.75 margin for Obama in reality), New Hampshire (vs. +5.8% Obama actual) and Wisconsin (vs. +6.7% Obama). Jordan opined: “Colorado will be a comfortable win for Romney of three to four points. The early voting has been a reversal from 2008, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats.” Obama took Colorado by 4.7 percent. So Jordan was off by 7.7-8.7 percentage points there.
xkcd said it best: Breaking: To surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be best system for determining which of two things is larger. Modern conservatives believe that they can create their own reality. I agree: they certainly do.