Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Raiting the polls

I was only off by 1% on my popular vote prediction. Not too bad on EV but not that good either. OH is the state that really threw my numbers off.

Probably the biggest single surprise of this election is IN. Even though the polls showed a fairly tight race I figured we'd see basically the same thing that did happen in GA. I just didn't think Obama could be close enough in the rural counties for the urban/suburb vote to push him over the edge.

NC isn't too shocking since Dole was in trouble too. That was a clear sign the Republicans had bigger problems down there than just Obama. It also goes back to demographics with NC. It's another state that is shedding it's hill billy reputation.

OH was a true toss-up. I don't think anyone could have really predicted it as anything more than a complete guess.

I was very confident about FL. It just seemed like everything was breaking in our favor there.. The margin of victory was much larger than I expected though.


Overall I think the polls were very accurate this year. There were single days here and there where the numbers got skewed one way or another but doing an average shows very consistent results. I suspect they were trying to be conservative on voter turnout. It's extremely hard to predict that type of thing. You knew it'd be high but new voters have to prove they can actually show up and vote so it's probably safe to under estimate their impact.

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