I wouldn't bother with it except that I had to put my gut feeling down on paper for my Elections 2000 class four years ago and I guess I'll keep the tradition going by doing the same this year. With any luck, my prediction will be as off-base this year as it was last:



Kerry: 51%
Bush: 48%
Nader: <1%

Senate:
Republicans: 52
Democrats: 47
Independents: 1

My feeling for the past couple of months has been that Bush would need to be ahead in the polls by at least 5% in order to stay close enough in the popular vote to pull enough states into his corner to win. Of course, share of the popular vote does not translate in to more or less states, but though I can't remember the exact numbers, once you're talking about a 2% differential, it becomes really really tough for the EC to swing the other way. This is particularly true of Bush, who is set to carry only one large state by a substantial margin (while Kerry will have two).

My reason for the 5% needed is that I believe that increased turnout on the Democratic side coupled with what I believe a last-minute tilt away from the President among undecideds (as usually occurs in an election with an incumbent) will give Kerry a better showing than the polls indicate just prior to the election. The couple of caveats are if Bush pulls away by more than 5% or Bush hovers at or above 50% in polls, then this map is useless (well, it's already useless, but you get the idea :))

Now, having said all this, it's important to note that my gut was very wrong last election. Click below for the last map.

Bush: 51%
Gore: 46%
Nader: 4%

Senate:
56 Republicans
44 Democrats

Note: the EV count above is not accurate because of the changes in the census favor Bush states, so just look at it on a state-by-state basis.

While the electoral college count wasn't too far off, some states I predicted Bush went Gore (Iowa, New Mexico) and my Gore predictions went Bush (Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee). The bigger errors were, of course, the popular vote. I must confess that I fell victim to the conventional wisdom that the popular vote favored Bush and the EC favored Gore. I didn't look closely enough at the polls in the individual states. I did look at voting history, but in the cases of Kentucky and West Virginia - to name two - history was misleading.

And, of course, the senate predictions. The Republicans lost five seats in 2000 and I predicted that they would pick up a couple. A lot of it came to my thinking that turnout would be lower than it was and that the Democratic mobilization efforts would fail for both presidential and senate votes, throwing the closer races over to the Republican column.

I should say that when I did wake up on election day, my feeling very quickly changed before the first vote was even cast. I'll post on that face-saver at a later date.

In any case, hopefully my feelings on this election will prove as foolish as my feelings on the last election.