Talk Elections

what happened?

i thought these states would be close (particularly nd).

i was very surprised when nd was called at poll close.

Bradley Effect.

My biggest odd result was Nevada, which had basically the same results as Wisconsin, Oregon and nearly the same as New Jersey.  This was supposed to be tight.

Georgia and ND reverted a bit, but were much closer than many thought they could be, just not actually tight as some expected.

Another oddity.  The state that actually put Obama up to 269 was Iowa, which was closer than PA, NH, NV, MN, NM.  Colorado was the state that Obama won with.  Obama could have won despite losing Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri, based on the margins in the states.

Was Georgia really that far off?

I'm not sure if all the early votes have been counted or not, but right now McCain's up 5.6%. 

The most recent polls of various companies were

SurveyUSA: McCain+7
Mason-Dixon: McCain+6
Rasmussen: McCain+5
CNN/Time: McCain+5
Strategic Vision: McCain+4
Research2000: McCain+3
PPP: McCain+2
InsiderAdvantage: McCain+1

So while there were a couple bad eggs, most of the polls were within a point or two. 

As for North Dakota, the problem was that we had very few polls, and those that we had were not from the best firms.  The last Rasmussen Poll was September 8, the last SurveyUSA poll was in February, and we were essentially trying to guess the state's result based on a couple Research2000 polls. 

Not enough polls out of North Dakota, I think. That state was always hard to predict.

GA looks like it's going to be McCain +4 or +5, and the AP still hasn't even called it. So Obama seems to have done pretty damn well there.

North Dakota's exit poll was wrong, and the networks acted on it.  It was a pretty safe call.

The South Dakota exit poll was hysterically wrong, on the other hand.

GA is 52-47, which is more or less where the polls had it, so nothing really strange happened in Georgia.