BTRTN: How We Did in Our BTRTN Midterm Election Predictions [View all]

[tgards79]

The political website self-assesses its performance in predicting the midterms.
http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2019/01/btrtn-how-we-did-with-our-btrtn-midterm.html

"The 116th Congress is now seated. Well, sort of. Our government is shut down and very little is actually happening (arguably that has been true for quite some time). The garbage piles up, Congress’ approval rating sinks even further (down to 9% in a recent YouGov poll), and Donald Trump continues to astonish in his single-minded focus on building a wall that both conservative immigration experts and border patrol agents think is a very low priority on their immigration wish lists.

So, with the new Congress seated but otherwise at a standstill, more or less, we decided it might finally be a good time, to give an assessment of how we did in forecasting the November, 2018 midterm elections. Why did we wait so long? Well, we had hopes that all of those straggler elections would be resolved so we could give a definitive final answer. But, alas, we have one to go, North Carolina’s 9th district, which still has yet to be certified due to allegations of widespread fraud, in a very close race. The machinations to fill the seat continue.

And so we go forward with our assessment. We looked the results in two ways:

1. The “overall" outcome – how did we do in projecting the total number of seats each party would end up with in the Senate, House and governorships?

2. The “specific" outcomes – how did we do in projecting each of the 505 elections (434 House ex-NC9, 35 Senate and 36 Governor)

We also looked at our results in an “absolute” sense -- how our predictions did versus the actual results -- and also on a relative basis -- how we did compared to the more widely-known prognosticators..."