FINAL RESULTS FOR 2008*
(*As of November 8, 2008)


Almost all of the results are in, and as projected, Barack Obama and Joe Biden won the presidential election in a landslide! So, how did we do this year with all our projections?

Overall, Obama performed better on average than our final projected spreads by state by a very tiny margin of 0.1%. We were high on some spreads and low on others, but on average we were right on the nose … not too liberal and not too conservative.

We projected 378 electoral votes for Obama and 160 electoral votes for John McCain, but the actual result is 365 for Obama and 173 for McCain, just 13 electoral votes off. We picked Missouri and North Dakota to tip to Obama but they both went to McCain. And Obama picked up one electoral vote from Nebraska, which we didn’t project.

Our popular vote projection for Obama was 52.4%, just 0.2 percentage points shy of his actual 52.6%. We had McCain projected at 45.4% of the popular vote and third party candidates projected at 2.2%, but third party candidates didn’t fare so well this year (1.3%), giving McCain an extra boost of 0.7% in the popular vote (46.1%). We projected a spread of 7.0 points in the popular vote, a little higher than the actual 6.5 point spread.

One item from our projections rang true, and we weren’t surprised: When a candidate is leading by greater than 5 points in a presidential election and maintains that lead, s/he tends to win the electoral vote by about a 40-point spread (see graph below). The actual electoral vote spread was Obama +35.6%, a result very close to similar presidential election cycles in the past (see the yellow data points below).





Minority voters and younger voters all saw increased turnout rates this year, while voters over age 65 seem to have had a lower turnout rate. According to exit polls, Barack Obama won every age group except senior citizens, tied among male voters and won handily among female voters. Overall turnout by voting age population, though, was just slightly above 2004 levels (70%, or 125 million) and nowhere near the projected 140 million votes. This slight increase could easily have been drawn from population growth alone.

The map below from the New York Times shows how Barack Obama performed county-by-county as compared to John Kerry four years ago … a sea of blue everywhere except mainly in the Appalachian region and bible belt, and a testament to the success of the 50-state strategy.






COMPARISON TO PROJECTIONS, As Of November 8, 2008


See the Final Projections Thread













TRACKING GRAPHS






























SWING STATE GRAPHS































































DEMOGRAPHIC GRAPHS



















































LINKS AND SOURCES


See the Final Projections Thread

Browse Past Editions of The Daily Widget, Back to March, 2008

Sources:
Pollster.com
FiveThirtyEight.com
Electoral-Vote.com
Intrade
Rasmussen Markets
RCP Average
RCP Latest Polls
3 Blue Dudes


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