Prior to the 2020 US elections, I ran a predictions tournament. Given that the Electoral College has now formally voted, putting the matter to rest – at least so far as non-ideologues are concerned – it is now time to run the results.
Best performance in terms of deviation of EC votes from Biden’s 306 (see bottom of the post for a full list of 37 predictions):
- Jayce
- Not Raul
- Annatar
- Blinky Bill (archive)
- Gorgeous George
- Anatoly Karlin
- Supply and Demand
- E. Harding
Congratulations Jayce!
Annatar made his prediction after Not Raul, so Not Raul has priority. Both only got Georgia wrong. Congratulations to both of them.
Blinky Bill‘s prediction no longer appears because the Tweet it linked to has been deleted. However, Audacious Epigone – who ran a parallel predictions tournament to mine – says that he recalls Blinky also only got Georgia wrong. I will take Blinky at his word if he decides to claim second place here, since he posted his prediction ahead of both Not Raul and Annatar. Preserved comment on archive.org confirms he is in joint second place with Annatar and Not Raul, and overall 2nd place if sorting by precedence. UPDATE – However, as was pointed out, Blinky Bill didn’t call the congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine, so despite getting the EC vote total correct, he did so less well than Annatar and Not Raul; as such, he drops to fourth place.
People who predicted <270 didn’t call the outcome. As such, close as some of them may have been at 268 and the like, there’s no point in extending it further.
“Rose glasses” to nickels, Marco de Wit, Forney, A123, LondonBob for their ironclad commitment to MAGA, some of whom continue the theme in highly agitated comments and “reacts” on various threads.
Likewise, a pair of rose glasses to Nemets for the blackpill OD. Though Nemets at least made big bucks bettin’ on Biden on PredictIt. Good strategy, that, if you gamble, bet on the side you’re not emotionally invested in, that way you won’t feel too sad about the outcome either which way.
Given the narrow margin that Trump won by in several states, perhaps a superior way of identifying the winner would be seeing who got the fewest number of winning voters wrong in states that they didn’t call:
- Not Raul – Georgia (+11,779) = 11,779
- Annatar – Georgia (+11,779) = 11,779
- Anatoly Karlin – Arizona (+10,457), Georgia (+11,779) = 22,236
- Blinky Bill – Georgia (+11,779), NE-2 (+22,091) / ME-2 (+27,996) = 61,866
- Jayce – Arizona (+10,457), Georgia (+11,779) / North Carolina (+74,481) = 96,717
- Gorgeous George – Minnesota (+233,012), Pennsylvania (+81,660), Wisconsin (+20,608) / North Carolina (+74,481) = 409,761
- E. Harding – Florida (+371,686), North Carolina (+74,481) = 446,167
- Supply and Demand – Arizona (+10,457), Georgia (+10,457), Colorado (~+440k), NE-2, New Mexico (~+100k) / Iowa (~138k), ME-2 = ~700k
Joint congratulations to Not Raul and Annatar on joint first place out of 37 contestants! (Blinky Bill didn’t call the congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine, as was just pointed out to me).
Also congrats to E. Harding for the impressive Georgia call.
All things considered, the people who predicted around 268 generally didn’t do badly either, it was mostly tight states that they were getting wrong.
Slightly regret not holding a competition on the raw percentage of the vote, since I’d have had a good chance of winning it [dated Tweet] (though Annatar might have cinched it):
Biden 51.10%
Trump 47.07%
This is a 0.42% point deviation from the actual current results of 51.31% for Biden, and 46.86% for Trump, as of today’s Wikipedia page on the elections. This placed me 2nd out of 64 people (see right) who participated in such a predictions tournament at the blog of Alexander Kireev, a Russian elections blogger. (Or outright first, had he gone with the current results from The Green Papers where Biden is now at 51.27% and Trump is at 46.82%).
On that note, I should point out that Kireev’s commentariat – just as during the 2016 elections – was extremely accurate on the ultimate result, as could be expected of informed Russian commenters not particularly beset by TDS and MAGA hopium. They predicted an average of 51.3% for Biden (spot on) and 45.8% for Trump (wrong by 1% point).
Seva Bashirov also compiled a “consensus map” of theor predictions from the first 42 participants in the states-level competition – everything correct except the Georgia upset:
Here are your predictions of how many EC votes Biden would get (let me know if I mistyped anything):
- nickels – 173
- Matt Forney – 207
- Marco de Wit – 209
- A123 – 218
- LondonBob – 218 (2)
- Raphael – 226
- botafeza – 229 (2)
- Dreadilk – 229
- e. york – 232
- Paulina – 233
- AltSerrice – 236
- Svevlad – 238
- Thorfinnsson – 249
- davidgmillsatty – 256
- AP – 258
- Excal – 258 (3)
- jeppo – 258 (2)
- Sean9292 – 259
- Tyler Durden – 259 (3)
- Vendetta – 259 (2)
- The Alarmist – 268 (2)
- Auferstanden – 268 (3)
- Patto – 268 (4)
- Tusk – 268
- 270 TO WIN
- Supply and Demand – 271 [-35]
- Anatoly Karlin – 279 [-27]
- Gorgeous George – 280 [-26]
- Annatar – 290 (3) [-16]
- Blinky Bill – 290 [-16]
- Not Raul – 290 (2) [-16]
- Jayce – 294 [-12]
- BIDEN ACTUAL RESULT – 306
- E. Harding – 350 [+44]
- protoneutype – 375
- Nemets – 376
- In Catilinam – 407
- zepplin – 413
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
Blinky Bill only got Georgia wrong:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201103023229/https://www.unz.com/akarlin/predictions-us-elections-2020/
Mr. Trump has been Fired, A123.
Georgia going Dem was blaringly predictable: the state trended D in 2008 and 2012, had a strong D trend in the 2016 election, got automatic voter registration following the 2016 election, Stacey Abrams got more votes than Hillary Clinton despite massively underperforming her in the rural areas of the state, the rural areas showed reasonably strong evidence that they would not be as Republican in 2020 as in 2018, and the Atlanta suburbs showed no sign of stopping their rapid blue trend. Ultimately, Atlanta’s suburbs saw the some of the strongest 2016-2020 Dem shifts in the country, including the single strongest one (Henry County).
My Florida misfire was just me underestimating the Latino tidal wave of rage. There were three Trump 2016->Biden 2020 counties in Florida; the non-Hispanic White vote swung towards Biden.
My North Carolina misfire was based on the state having trended D in every election since 2004 and suspecting that the decent Republican turnout seen in the early voting would be countered by Dem trends in the White vote around Raleigh and Charlotte, as well as in the college towns – I was correct here, but not enough. I also was too dismissive of the early voting due to assuming pollsters fixed their mistakes since 2016 and that 2020 was too unique a year to make early voting inferences off of – I was wrong on both counts. Turnout was simply too good for the GOP for the Dems to flip the state, thus resulting in the Senate race and presidential race there going for the Rs, completely contradicting the polling. I certainly did not expect the state would trend Republican in 2020.
Pure excellence at Führer bunker circa 1945 reality perception levels 🙂
The zionist anon is just living up to his potential. Master spreader of mind numbing shit.
Somebody should quote Forney’s MAGA-cope posts here.
So how many of the worthies above predicted the massive electoral fraud? (Count me in the cope gang, lol.)
The great James Corbett has been using the Archive.org copy of pieces he references (usually evil-doers” instead of the original site for two reasons:
1. The tendency for memory-holing.
2. Why give the bastards the traffic?
He’s been talking about the perils of digital data for a while under the rubric of The digital Library of Alexandria is Burning:
https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-384-the-library-of-alexandria-is-on-fire/
No offense, Anatoly, but you worked your ass off to put all this together, but to what end? There were such tilts via cheating in who knows how many states/commonwealths, and so how do you factor that stuff in? Did any of the contestants bake a little (or a lot) of election cheating into their predictions?
Hey, how’s Mr. Martyanov these days? He doesn’t seem to dip his oar in the water here much lately. Love to hear his take on this, I’ve gotten to where I prefer outsiders’ view on this horror show, he’s one of them, you’re another, of course. I like that guy, well, his writing anyway, can’t say I ever met him. Here’s wishing Andrei well.
MIGApedes like you are inevitably sore losers when the facts are present.
#NotMyPresident(*) #Resistance etc
In this case, the fraud was just too massive and blatant to accept with the rueful smile of the loser so I won’t. Lifelong learning, buddy.
Just out of curiosity – so assuming Biden only won thanks to massive fraud, how exactly does that make him the cuck for… cucking Trump out of the Presidency?
If true that sounds Chad as fuck to me.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EmJhlYsW0AIM8yx.jpg
Agreed. The fraud nearly complete, about all you can say is to the Democrats is “Well played”. If the courts reverse things, shame, shame. Courts are part of the election process now. Each party had better get good at. Anatoly, is there CNN at that prison camp for the skinny MAGAs?
Who cares about the elections, let alone predictions? We just saw that it does not matter how they vote, it only matters who counts the votes. Perfect democracy. Comrade Stalin and parteigenosse Hitler would approve wholeheartedly.
Like all conservatives, he thinks winning is “cucking”.
I suppose that is why Trump spent his entire presidency after May 2017 rat-fucking his base, bombing Assad, feeding General Flynn to the wolves, turning his back on the fine folks at Charlottesville, et cetera.
He knows what his base wants. They want to lose.
You sound like another sore loser. If your map wasn’t filled out with appropriate predictions of election fraud, you’re a naive loser at that.
I must disappoint you: I don’t do predictions when sharpers play. Enjoy corrupt senile half-corpse, the “president” the likes of you deserve.
Must I post this map every time? Pink=Biden doing better than Hillary in the two-party vote. Some fraud.
https://uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/GENERAL/TREND/pe2020swg.png
I emigrated to China 5 years ago. I certainly will! We’re all about to get very rich off the Yeltsin-ing of America.
I think the question to ask is: will the prison camps for the skinny MAGAs resemble airport terminals? As that is the only place people watch CNN since they are unable to escape from the forced indoctrination piped 24/7 from the Big Brother terminals.
My take was just more or less what I figured as far back as 2017.
In terms of predicting states I relied upon the following sets of data:
For example I predicted PA and AZ would go for Biden and NC and FL based mainly off the early vote, Trump was doing well in NC and FL, poorly in AZ and PA.
The one state I got wrong was GA which does not have voter registration by party for whatever reason, as a result there was no way to know whether more Republicans or democrats had registered since 2016 and who was winning the early vote relative to 2016.
Overall the election outcome was fairly easy to predict, one had to take into account the systematic underestimation of the non-college white vote for Republicans though which has been a consistent feature since 2014, it was easy to see polls would underestimate Trump in a lot of states with a lot of non-college whites.
In Iowa for example Republicans have outperformed their polls in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020, 4 cycles in a row because polls can’t accurately capture the voting preferences of non-college whites.
I factored that into my analysis, hence why I had NC and FL going for Trump, the early voting data was there and also I assumed polls would mis-represent the voting intentions of non-college whites once again.
Trump lost ultimately because he collapsed among college whites relative to 2016, non-college whites remained with him, in some areas he did even better like Mahoning and Lorain counties in Ohio.
https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1338870728914038785
big bucks bettin
Pure gold, thanks. Right even down to the syllables (and cadence).
Good for you. I live in the US and I don’t want the country to become a shithole, like the country where election fraud made corrupt senile half-corpse president before, Zimbabwe.
I actually beat Blinky Bill; because I also got the congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine right.
Thanks, time for another fix.
In this case, you and Annatar are the undisputed joint winners. Congrats!
Well, personally I read these because I find them fun, and I don’t think there’s any pressure on anyone to participate if they don’t. If people you’d rather cope forever there’s nothing stopping you.
How? Look forward to Biden’s ‘prepping of the bull’.
As someone put this well in some other thread, the people in the US fall into two categories: those who think that the elections were rigged and it’s good, and those who think that the elections were rigged, and it’s bad.
There are those who believe the elections were not rigged, and that it’s bad, but it’s nonetheless good that many think they were.
I predicted fraud and lawsuits in Pennsylvania, but I was very naïve about just how widespread this would be, and how strong. I was imagining Florida 2000-style stuff in Pennsylvania, not Chicago 1960 in almost every swing state.
Georgia going D is probably quite soon, but I didn’t think the numbers were there quite yet — and I still don’t.
However, this election has reminded us that when things are close enough, somebody will try to tip the scales if they think they can get away with it. Clearly the Dems in Georgia were very, very hungry, and unbound by scruples, and they are probably going to get away with it.
Next time, they’ll get away with it even harder, especially with Abrams as governor; and they’ll probably have the numbers anyway, just like in California.
Well,
I got honorable mention, which is a highlight of my day 😉
Either way, I truly believe that fraud took place, just as I believe that it will be allowed. Sort of like with OJ, sometimes ignoring the truth is more beneficial in the short term.
Now the US is the best ever banana republic to exist ever. It’s votes were counted by and the software for it created by foreigners, it’s voting system besmirched by mail in ballots, faith in institutions lowest ever, racial tensions highest ever, also the ideological tensions, highest gun ownership, paper tiger military (except nukes and subs) that’s completely unwilling to be used internally in order to restore any semblance of constitutional integrity and order….
Yet I predict this dog and pony show to go on as long as Democrats can cling to power, since only they are crazy enough to break the union if power slips from their fingers. The Republicans will bitch and moan and do nothing really about being dispossessed, they will just keep taking it so that their elite can have their piece of the diminishing pie.
SCOTUS with their injustice just saved the dying republic for about 20 years, after which there will be far less to save.
As American saying puts it, there is a sucker born every minute.
I didn’t lose money on Trump’s loss, so how am I the sucker?
Some actual suckers: https://www.insider.com/bettors-plan-to-sue-betfair-after-they-called-election-biden-2020-12
I really do admire your optimism. I say Trump will fade into the night, with his posse of lawyers and I’ll even guess that Pence will do a fantastic backstab at the very end by congratulating Biden.
I see Pence as a swamp creature, not deep swamp but still enough to calculate that he might position himself better by doing that in the end.
Either way I hope that you’re right and I’m not.