It's taken us a little while to score the results of our
2014 Daily Kos Elections prediction contest so we won't beat around the bush: Our winner is Sweden's own
Tayya!
Tayya scored 41, just ahead of gabachi's 40. The median score was 22 points, and an enormous 740 Daily Kos community members entered in total, so this is quite impressive indeed! For his victory, Tayya earns a delicious babka from Green's Bakery, as shown above. (Please message us to collect your reward.)
As you may recall, we asked you to pick the winners of all the contests we regarded as Tossups shortly before Election Day—eight for Senate, 10 for governorships, and 21 for the House. You earned one point for each correct answer.
We also asked you to pick the closest race, in percentage terms, in each of those three categories (Senate, governor, House). Nailing each of those questions earned you five points; if you picked the second-closest race, you got four points, and so on. (You can see which races wound up the tightest here.) That meant the maximum possible score was 54 points. (There was also an unused tie-breaker involving the South Dakota Senate race.)
Tayya won top honors by taking the unpopular but correct side of several wagers. As you can see in the chart below, only 10 percent of entrants predicted that Florida Gov. Rick Scott would survive, a bare 9 percent called Gov. Sam Brownback's victory in Kansas, and just 6 percent guessed that Thom Tillis would unseat Kay Hagan in North Carolina. In a wave year like 2014, betting on the GOP turned out to be a good strategy.
The full list of results is available
here, and you can find your original guesses
here. (Remember, if you entered more than once, only your final entry counted.) Congratulations, and thanks again to everyone who participated in this year's contest!