The results are in: Obama wins all of his 2008 states, minus Indiana and North Carolina, for 332 electoral votes. This is exactly as I predicted on Tuesday morning – and as I’ve been predicting (albeit with greater uncertainty) since June. Not bad! The Atlantic Wire awarded me a Gold Star for being one of “The Most Correct Pundits In All the Land”. There were also nice write-ups in The Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC News Magazine, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the LA Times, among others. Thanks to everyone who has visited the site, participated in the comments, and offered their congratulations. I really appreciate it.

I’m still planning a complete assessment of the performance of the forecasting model, along the lines I described a few weeks ago. But in the meantime, a few quick looks at how my Election Day predictions stacked up against the actual state-level vote outcomes. First, a simple scatterplot of my final predictions versus each state’s election result. Perfect predictions will fall along the 45-degree line. If a state is above the 45-degree line, then Obama performed better than expected; otherwise he fared worse.

Interestingly, in most of the battleground states, Obama did indeed outperform the polls; suggesting that a subset of the surveys in those states were tilted in Romney’s favor, just as I’d suspected. Across all 50 states, however, the polls were extremely accurate. The average difference between the actual state vote outcomes and the final predictions of my model was a miniscule 0.03% towards Obama.

My final estimates predicted 19 states within 1% of the truth, with a mean absolute deviation of 1.7%, and a state-level RMSE of 2.3% (these may change slightly as more votes are counted). Other analysts at the CFAR blog and Margin of Error compared my estimates to those of Nate Silver, Sam Wang, Simon Jackman, and Josh Putnam, and found they did very well. All in all, a nice round of success for us “quants”.

Unsurprisingly, my model made much better predictions where more polls had been fielded! Here I’ll plot the difference between Obama’s share of the two-party vote in each state, and my final prediction, as a function of the number of polls in the state since May 1. Again, positive values indicate states where Obama did better than expected.

For minimizing the error in my forecasts, the magic number of polls per state appears to be around 25. That’s really not a lot; and I’m hopeful that we can get to at least this number in 2016. It’s a bit concerning, though, that there were about 25% fewer state-level presidential polls this year, compared to 2008.

Recently there have been some complaints among pollsters – most notably Gallup’s Frank Newport – that survey aggregators (like me) “don’t exist without people who are out there actually doing polls,” and that our work threatens to dissuade survey organizations from gathering these data in the first place. My view is slightly different. I’d say that working together, we’ve proven once again that public opinion research is a valuable source of information for understanding campaign dynamics and predicting election outcomes. There’s no reason why the relationship shouldn’t be one of mutual benefit, rather than competition or rivalry. In a similar manner, our analyses supplement – not replace – more traditional forms of campaign reporting. We should all be seen as moving political expertise forward, in an empirical and evidence-based way.