This blog is shockingly old. At least shocking to me. How it is possible that I have been doing this for over 17 years? For an old blog like this (and let's face it, whatever political blogs are still blogging are all old), I've accumulated traditions like barnacles. One of those barnacles is posting my prediction for the electoral map just before the election.
I didn't publish a projected map for the 2004 election. But I did in 2008 and when I did it felt like a fairly educated guess based upon what polls I could review and my general sense of stuff. My 2008 map was influenced a bit by election prediction models. But they weren't a big thing yet, so it was more guess than science. Same with 2012, only with a bit more reliance on the models. By 2016, it felt like the room for guesswork had pretty much vanished. Between 538, the Princeton election projection project, the NYT's projection, etc., the science of number crunching had crowded out any room for the kind of good old fashioned educated guesswork. But in 2016, I did one anyway which basically cribbed off the consensus among the election projection site to project a clear win for Clinton. You can't question science, right?
I don't know where that leaves me with this year, but I decided to do one again anyway. Despite what happened in 2016, there is even more "scientific" analysis of the polls and supposedly the various models have fixed whatever they missed in 2016 (actually most of what they missed was good polls of MI and WI. Other than that they were pretty accurate. It's just that MI and WI happened to be two of the states that decided the race). So, unless the premise of the entire election prediction enterprise is flawed, they will probably be right this time. Except that the President is clearly and openly trying to disqualify various votes (i.e. cheat). If successful that will make all the whole premise of all the predictive algorithms wrong. So maybe all those models aren't rock solid after all. Which leaves me back with educated guesswork. For what it's worth, here's what I predict:
I'm looking forward to seeing how full of shit I am.
As for my record:
