With recounts finalized in Virginia shortly before the holidays, the dust has finally settled on the 2023 election cycle. And you know what that means: We can now unveil the winners of the 2023 Daily Kos Elections prediction contest!
As you may recall, we asked you to predict the winners of nine races—ranging from marquee top-of-the-ticket elections to downballot deep cuts—as well as the number of seats you expected Democrats to win in Virginia’s legislative elections.
Ultimately, we had an astonishing eight-way tie for first place, requiring the results of the tiebreaker round—in which we asked entrants to guess the percentage that John Whitmire and Sheila Jackson Lee would receive in the first round of Houston’s mayoral election—to separate the top four finishers from the rest of the pack.
In first place was Estquer, who had the lowest tiebreaker error score of 9.2. DCPatriot and Major Tom tied for second with a tiebreaker score of 11.0 each (a tie in the tiebreaker round! wow!), and Aspi rounded out the top four with a score of 17. All four winners will receive gift baskets from Green’s Bakery, as pictured above!
Special honorable mentions are extended to Daily Kos users estern123, arjav, chasejs2013892, and childers moof, who tied for first place but were eliminated from the top four during the tiebreaker round. And a very special honorable mention is extended to Stephen Wolf, whose score of 23 points would have been enough to win the contest outright … if only he were not employed by Daily Kos and therefore ineligible to win a prize—though you can see why we hired him!
If you’d like to see how you stacked up, you can see our full spreadsheet of results here.
Thanks again to all who entered, and a special thank you to our generous sponsor, GreensBabka.com! We’ll be in touch with the winners shortly to arrange for the delivery of your delicious baked goods!
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