If you checked FiveThirtyEight right before the election, you would have seen that their final prediction was that Lt. Governor Anthony Brown, the Democrat, would win the Maryland Governor's race by 9.7%. Instead, Brown lost by five percentage points.
In an article today, Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight admitted
Our forecast wasn’t even close.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/...
So what explains such a huge error by a website that so accurately predicted the outcome of the Presidential Race n 2012. Enten has an explanation:
Our gubernatorial model relies on polls, and polls alone, and the most reliable public pollsters stopped surveying the race a month before Election Day. The final surveys from The Baltimore Sun and Washington Post, taken between Oct. 2 and Oct. 8, had Brown ahead by an average of 8 percentage points.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/...
FiveThirtyEight does however indicate that there were internal polls taken by the Republicans or Hogan's campaign but these polls were not used by FiveThirtyEight due the unreliability of internal polls.
So the only polls that they used in their model were polls that were old and did not reflect the actual state of the Governor's race right before the election.
Before Tuesday night, I did not think that Brown could lose. I saw the Washington Post poll and thought that Brown was on his way to a decent sized victory. After all, this was Maryland, a blue state.
I suspect that if Hogan's internal polls showed that Brown could lose that the Brown campaign's internal polls showed the same thing. But this message did not get out to the grassroots. Yes, I got the e-mails from the Democratic Party inviting me to rallies and asking for volunteers and donations but I get these every election. And there was no indication that this election was any different from the other elections where the Democrats won by a decent margin. And like other progressives, I really didn't see the need to volunteer for a candidate picked by the Democratic establishment who did not particularly impress me.
The article in FiveThirtyEight gave me something to think about.
Brown was a 94 percent favorite. . . . 94 percent favorites are supposed to lose sometimes (6 percent of the time, to be exact). Hogan’s chance of winning was roughly equivalent to the chance No. 14 seed Mercer had of beating No. 3 seed Duke in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this past March. Underdogs can win.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/...
94% is not 100%. Just because things look good for the Democrats doesn't mean that they will win--even in a blue state like Maryland.
And there is the possibility of movement in races where one candidate appears way ahead of the other a few weeks before the election. And it is important to look at the age of the polls and not just the findings and the reliability of the polls.
Hopefully, the media in Maryland will learn from this and will poll more frequently in the future. But if they don't, I won't be complacent again.