Cassidy’s Count: A Victory for the Pollsters and the Forecasters

Now that the Florida authorities have finally confirmed that President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the Sunshine State by a margin of 50.0 per cent to 49.1 per cent, we have all the results and data we need to talk about what happened in the 2012 election, and who got it right. Obviously, Nate Silver did—more about that below. But so did most of the other forecasters, and, more importantly, many of the pollsters on whose work all the prognosticators, Silver and myself included, relied. To remind you, here are the results: President Obama won the popular vote by 50.5 per cent to 47.9 per cent, a margin of 2.6 per cent. In the Electoral College, he got 332 votes and Mitt Romney got 206 votes. Obama carried almost all the battlegrounds, which, for these purposes, I will consider as eleven states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

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