Let it be known that I was the only person on this entire message board to correctly predict that Obama would win re-election.
I correctly predicted that Obama would win re-election, that Democrats would retain the Senate, that Republicans would retain the House, and that Republicans would gain at least one governorship. However, my state-by-state breakdown could have been more accurate. Namely, in the presidential race, I was off by three states: I had wrongly predicted that Colorado, Virginia, and Florida would go for Romney. I see where I made my error though. I was over-complicating things by trying to include estimates of early voting results in my projection of the winners in each state. For example, I saw an MSNBC report over the weekend indicating that an estimated 85% of Colorado likely voters had already cast their ballots and that Romney was favored in them. Therefore I predicted Romney would win Colorado for sure. I likewise looked at Virginia and Florida kind of expecting Romney to win because he was leading in the polls in those two states for much of October, when early voting was going on. In reality, if I had simply based my prediction on what the major, non-partisan, national-level polls from the last weekend before election day said, I would have correctly predicted the outcome for every state. I'll learn from this mistake in future predictions. It's not as complicated as I thought!
As to those who have said all along that polls don't matter and are all just a bunch of lies...well...you can see otherwise. The major, non-partisan, national-level polls (i.e. think the NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls, NOT partisan polls like Rasmussen or local newspaper polls like the
Miami Herald) correctly predicted the outcome for every state.
Among the professional election predictors, Nate Silver's controversial 538 blog was largely validated. Nate provided the single most accurate prediction of any of the experts. Of course there were only two expert sources that bothered to even call all the states (the other being
Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball). I consider a failure to call every state cowardly and cheating when it comes to classifying yourself as an expert predictor. Part of being an expert lies in being able to make accurate guesses when you're not sure.