This November's Daily Kos Elections prediction contest is our simplest yet—but it's also quite challenging: You just need to guess the winner in all of the races—Senate, governor, and House—that we've rated as Tossups as of Sunday evening, November 4. (As we've said, we may make some last-minute ratings adjustments, but those won't affect the contest.) The winner is the person who calls the most races correctly. And don't worry: We've created a handy form for you to fill out, which even includes candidates' names and party affiliations.
For a tiebreaker question, you need to guess the final percentage of the vote for each of the three main candidates in the Maine Senate race (independent Angus King, Republican Charlie Summers, and Democrat Cynthia Hill). Note that there are three additional minor candidates in that race, so you will not want your percentages to add up to 100.
You need a Daily Kos account in order to be eligible, and you can submit your guesses until polls start closing in the first two states (Indiana and Kentucky), at 6pm Eastern on Tuesday evening. One entry per person. (If you fill out the form more than once, only your last set of entries will be counted.) And feel free to post your predictions in comments as well—though only entries using the actual contest form will be considered.
To the victor, of course, goes babka. Which reminds me... we're rather delinquent on a couple of contests we held last year! Alright, well, it's time (long past time) for us to finally pay up. For our NY-26 special election contest (the seat now numbered NY-27, where Democrat Kathy Hochul was the unlikely winner and now faces an uphill battle for re-election), the challenge was to guess the percentage of the vote taken by each of the four major candidates: Hochul, Republican Jane Corwin, independent "Crazy" Jack Davis, and Green Partier Ian Murphy. The winner is Udestedt, whose total error was just 2.0% across all four candidates. It was very close, with sharris0512 just 0.1% back and both Cole Stevens and drhoosierdem only 0.2% off the pace. The average error was 6.7%. You can find out how you did here.
Our other outstanding contest involved predicting five contests from the Nov. 8, 2011 election: Maine Question 1 (a measure to overturn a law repealing the state's same-day election registration), Ohio Issue 2 (a measure to overturn a law repealing collective bargaining rights for public employees, Mississippi Initiative 26 (a so-called "fetal personhood" amendment), the Iowa state Senate District 18 special, and the Kentucky governor's race. The winner is admd94, with a total error of just 33.1% across all five races. In second was Zmaz with 40.7% and just behind was JGibson with 40.9%. The average error was 69.4% (though that doesn't include a number of people who unfortunately failed to fill in their usernames). To see how you did, click here.
Our two winners can step forward and claim their babkas (and I'll also be sending PMs). And for our new contest, I promise that a winner will be announced much more quickly than we did for the prior two events! So get guessing!