Hello and welcome to the 2018 SDMB Election contest. I’m your moderator, Jonathan Chance, and I’ll be here for all of your moderating needs as we build to a wacky, crazy election cycle.
You can see our previous election contest here. Congrats to Enlightening Meditation on the win.
**The prize: **
The winner will receive this as his or her custom title: “2018 Midterm Prediction Winner”. That will last for one year and the winner is certainly entitled to be insufferable at his or her discretion. Following that it will be up to the winner to maintain or abandon the title going into the 2020 election.
Ain’t life grand?
**The contest: **
Players will be asked to do three things, all predictions, two as the main contest and one as the tiebreaker.
Predict the party split of the House of Representatives
Predict the party split of the US Senate
Predict the national vote percentages by party in full numbers. No decimals.
The third factor will be our first tie breaker, should more than one player - as seems likely - guess the same outcome. Should two or more players still be tied, then the first to make the guess will be the winner. Time of guess will be determined based on the time stamp of the post.
Players may guess multiple times, but only the latest one will count toward the contest and the time stamp tiebreaker.
Scoring:
Lowest score wins.
A player receives one point for each member they are off in the final outcome.
Example: A player selections 220-215 D in the House and 50-50 in the Senate as well as 51-49 R in the national vote totals. The actual outcome is 218-217 D, 52-48 and 53-47 in the national vote total. Using the first number of each we see that the player was off by 2 in the House and 2 in the senate for a total of 4 points. The tiebreak would show them off by 2 in the national vote total. Should another player have 3 total points in the House and the Senate, that player would defeat our player.
As moderator, I will maintain a public list of guesses for everyone to peruse.
When you say “the national vote totals,” I assume you specifically mean the House of Representatives vote totals, which are national* while the Senate races in any given year aren’t.
*Well, national except for D.C. Or do we include the tally for D.C.'s non-voting delegate?
How are you going to handle officeholders who change their party after the election and before the new Congress is seated? For example, a Senator who is not re-elected in 2018, switches parties in December 2018.
ETA: Meant “when do entries stop being accepted?” (The contest closes when the outcomes of all races have been determined, of course. In 2008, that would have taken until the following July. Hopefully that won’t happen this time. :))