Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Last Minute Prediction

I'm going to make 3 last minute predictions for the record. Contrary to conventional wisdom,

  1. We will know the winner by 3 AM EST.
  2. The winner will win by a margin of more than 1.5% of the popular vote. (I almost went to 2, but I chickened out.)
  3. The winner will win by 50 electoral votes.


I'm not greatly confident of these, but it's my gut feeling, and I wanted to get it out there "in print" before the election.

3 comments:

Jon Grantham said...

After having some time to think it over, I believe that I want to refine prediction #2 to "around 1.5% of the popular vote". Insert around in appropriate places in #1 and #3.

Time to go look and see if anybody's leaked the exit polls.

Anonymous said...

Are you going to tell us how your predictions matched up with reality -- or am I going to have to read a newspaper?

Jon Grantham said...

1. At 1 AM EST, when I stopped watching, CNN was not projecting a winner, but all of the pundits were talking about why Kerry lost. It's hard to pinpoint an exact time at which we "knew" the winner. But if you look at this article, it wasn't too long after 3 that networks started giving Nevada to Bush, which put him over the top along with Ohio. The networks that gave Bush Ohio did not give him Nevada, and vice versa, so who knows when we "knew"?

2. According to this page, the margin was around 3%, so I was a bit low.

3. Bush won by 34; I think 50 was a respectable guess.