With most of the votes counted, Stochastic Democracy analyzes how well it's model's predictions fared fared, and looks at how well pollsters performed.
StochasticDemocracy.Blogspot.com
**************Cross-Posted at StochasticDemocracy**********
A chart showing Obama's performance in the election relative to the filtered average of polls in the state before election night. The CI lines show the 95% confidence intervals of the poll average.
To see our post analyzing poll accuracy, see here.
To see our post analyzing differences between polls and votes using linear regression, see here.
It looks like altogether, our electoral predictions turned out to be pretty accurate.
Electoral:
Indiana was our only mis-prediction, and we gave Obama a 48% chance there.
So we only miscalled 1 state, and it looks like Obama obtained 364 electoral votes, which we correctly identified as tied with 366 for being the most likely EV total.
Altogether, we called 50 out of 51 states/districts correctly, and correctly predicted the exact electoral vote breakdown.
National:
It's too early to say with certainty, but two-way vote-share is at 53% so far, while we predicted 53.7%. Not too bad, and well within our posted margin of error. (That, and apparently the remaining votes lean Obama)
As far as raw totals, we predicted would get 52.68% . So far, actual numbers seem to put Obama at 52.3.
Off by less than 4 tenths of a point! Not too shabby.
Senate:
The key races are still in doubt, but so far it's looking good.
Turnout:
According to the good folks at George Mason University, my turnout estimate seems to have been fairly on the mark.
But it's too early to say for sure. So far, my estimate was off by about 2%.
Livecalling:
After all our hard work, we manged to call the race for Barrack Obama two and a half minutes before the major networks. One must appreciate the little victories...
Seriously though, we managed to call Florida, Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina before 11 PM.
Meanwhile, I'm truly thankful to have had Rasmus and Blarghman working with me. Despite hailing from Germany and Canada respectively, they easily know more about this country on a county level than anyone else in the world.
After sitting in on some heated arguments about the minutiae of turnout assumptions in obscure counties I had never heard of, I'm shocked that neither of them have been picked up by a campaign.