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2020 Electoral College Contest Results

Ozean Media and Meer Research recently sponsored a contest asking people to predict the Electoral College outcome for 2020. We thought we would share the predictions and results with you.

Winner of Electoral College – Biden / Harris

90% of the contestants picked the correct winner of the Electoral College to be President-elect Joe Biden.

Electoral College – Detail

On average, our contestants predicted 320 Electoral College votes for Joe Biden and 219 for Donald Trump. (totals do not equal 538 due to rounding).

Electoral College Prediction Accuracy

On average, contestants were more bullish on Joe Biden’s chances – predicting approximately 14 more Electoral College votes for Joe Biden than the actual results.

Electoral College – States Detail

On average, 8 states / electoral college allocations were predicted incorrectly by contestants. 

The most missed / incorrect calls:  ME CD2 (79% incorrect), GA (76% incorrect), NC (72% incorrect), NE CD2 (62% incorrect), and Florida (55% incorrect). 

The perfect calls:  100% of contestants picked correctly:  AL, MA, NY, and VT. 

Popular Vote Prediction Accuracy

On average, contestants predicted the popular vote share as:  51.8% for Joe Biden, 45.1% for Donald Trump, and 3.1% for Other.  

As of the writing of this, the Cook Political Report shows a popular vote share of 50.9% for Joe Biden, 47.3% for Donald Trump, and 1.8% for Other.

Conclusion

We enjoyed hosting the contest, and found the results to be interesting.

We are awaiting permission from the winner to publicly release his name, and if granted we will do so.

The most interesting thing to me was the fact that someone could in theory mis-call a significant number of states and yet still arrive at the “correct” electoral votes. Something to think about when writing contest rules.

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