GRADING MYSELF

GRADING MYSELF ON MY 2008 PREDICTION
Kenneth Hacker

I was right about Obama winning although I had him winning by less electoral college votes than he actually received. I was not too far enough with my popular vote prediction -- on the high end that is, which I said could be as much as 5% higher than McCain. But I had the low end at a 1% margin over McCain. Thus overall, I underestimated the red states turning blue in the cases of Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. I made my predictions on October 17, 2008.

I believe that I was also correct in noting that Sarah Palin would do harm to the McCain candidacy. It is truly amazing that she still thinks she can so something big -- what might this be - sink the entire Republican Party?!

Of course, one cannot realistically pin down the defeat of McCain to any single factor, although many pundits and amateur analysts are doing just that. Some say it was the sorry state of the economy and others say it was voting turnout. In fact, the victory for Obama is a combination of good candidate image building strategies and the defeat of McCain is the product of numerous bad decisions about campaign messages. I will be posting details about the multi-faceted nature of the win and defeat later.

For now, I grade myself with a B for my effort to predict the election.