This is it. After weeks of anticipation—and with the 116th Congress now sworn in—we’re pleased to announce the winner of the 2018 Daily Kos Elections prediction contest, which was, once again, graciously sponsored by our friends at Green’s Babka: Zmaz! Out of a possible 41 points, Zmaz scored the highest at 35, with an edge gained in the tiebreaker round. You can find the full list of results, including your own scores, here.
The top four also included MattTX, jpoisner2017, and jhagner, who scored 35, 34, and 33 points, respectively (jhagner broke an eight-way tie for fourth). Each winner will receive a lavish, 52-oz. “Executive Babka” from Green’s!
As you may recall, we asked you to pick the winners of all the contests we regarded as “Tossups” shortly before Election Day—six for Senate, eight for governor, and 28 for the House. You earned one point for each correct answer.
We also included a tiebreaker question for Maine's gubernatorial race that asked you to guess the actual vote totals for all four candidates on the ballot. The closest guess on the tiebreaker came from Progressive America, whose net error was just 1.38 points off the actual totals. (Note that Maine’s election officials did not tabulate results from any ballots cast for independent Alan Caron, who dropped out in the waning days of the election. We therefore assigned a value of “0” to Caron’s score when calculating the tiebreaker results.)
Note that we also made the decision to scrap all responses received for the fraud-tainted election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, which remains unresolved. (The new Congress did not swear anyone in to sit in this seat on Thursday.) As a result, guesses counted for only 27, rather than 28, House races.
In total, we received a ginormous 737 entries. (The names you see grayed out belong to Daily Kos staff, who were ineligible to win prizes—sorry, Stephen!) The average point total was 27, and the average tiebreaker error was 13 points.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in this year's contest, and special thanks to our sponsor, Green’s Babka! We’ll be in touch with the winners. And congratulations, Zmaz!