Nate Silver has, at least for backers of President Obama, become something of a hero for his prediction prowess based on his own super-secret statistical formula.
Silver, the Hollywood heartthrob and New York Times blogger, did in fact call Obama’s electoral win right on the money, at 332 electoral votes.
A look at key factors in the 2012 presidential election.
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But so did Sophia McCrimmon, an eighth-grader at Chickahominy Middle School in Mechanicsville, Va., who entered her prediction on Sept. 14 — weeks before Obama’s famous first debate.
“I figured Obama was going to win every state he won in 2008 except for North Carolina and Indiana,” she explained in an e-mail after being told she was a winner of the In the Loop Presidential Election Contest.
This was a two-part contest. Winners would be the first 10 entrants to predict the electoral vote and the first 10 to guess the new (old) president’s popular-vote percentage.
In fact, all winners in the electoral-vote category guessed Obama would get 332 electoral votes. They are:
●Matthew Weng, a staff attorney with the New Jersey State League of Municipalities in Trenton.
●Mark Levine, a radio talk show host and TV pundit and former legislative counsel to outgoing Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).
●John McCormick, a front-desk clerk from Bethesda.
●Stuart Davis, a retired teacher from Arlington.
●Nathaniel M. Deutsch, a human resources consultant in Washington.
●Jay Cherlow, a retired economist from Arlington.
●Jeff Holtmeier, a retired Internal Revenue Service agent and now part-time tax return preparer in Fairfax County.
●Chris Dunkak of Middletown, N.J.
●David Bushnell, a consultant from Silver Spring, whose entry arrived three hours and 14 minutes before one submitted by Chris Doyle of Ponder, Tex.
A fair number of votes — absentees, provisionals and such — are still being tallied in several states, Obama appears to have moved a bit over 50.7 percent as the post-election numbers come in, according to David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, and it may be that he’ll reach the 50.8 percent mark, which Silver predicted.
So we’re going to hold off for the moment on announcing winners in the popular vote percentage category.
Green pastures?
Environmentalists have been popping champagne corks (and then, of course, recycling the bottles) after the elections. Now they’re hoping the successes they saw in knocking off foes and electing friends will help them prove that being environmentally friendly pays off at the polls — and adds heft to their second-term agenda.
The League of Conservation Voters is cheering the defeat of 11 of the 12 lawmakers it dubbed the “Dirty Dozen” for their poor records on pollution. The LCV ran a $10 million campaign against them and five climate-change deniers (the “Flat Earth Five”), four of whom also lost.
Despite those wins, says LCV Senior Vice President for Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld, the GOP-led House isn’t likely to be fertile ground for eco-friendly legislation. So the group is again looking to the administration.
Climate change tops the wish list for this term, including limiting carbon pollution, developing renewable energy sources and stopping the development of “dirty” fuels (hello, Keystone pipeline).
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