Gubernatorial Races Results

Out of the 36 Gubernatorial races we were tasked with covering, we accurately predicted 30 of the 36 races. Now, while 6 races may seem like a lot to have missed, especially out of only 36, the races we called incorrectly were tossups, and fell the other way. In fact, out of the 18 tossups we called, we managed to get 12 of them right. The races we called incorrectly were in Kansas, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Illinois, and Maryland. In most of those cases, we tended to choose the Democrat even though conventional knowledge would have told us to do otherwise, seeing as the Republican Party was projected to take a large portion of the seats up for election, which is what likely led to our inaccuracy, but it must also be taken into account that the races we missed were races that were fewer than 10 points apart in pre-election polls.

As was the case with the majority of races we called wrong, we tended to side with the Democrat, based either on incumbency, polling patterns, or state voting traditions. However, in Connecticut, we chose Republican Tom Foley to displace incumbent Dannel Malloy, based on the fact that Foley seemed to be taking a lead in polls, and that Malloy seemed to be in particular dire straits when it came to retaining his seat. Alternatively, every other race we missed had us choosing a Democrat to unseat a Republican, and in hindsight that was almost always the wrong call, as the majority of incumbents, regardless of party, tended to retain their seats. The correct predictions we had generally sided with incumbents, unless polls outwardly stated they didn’t have a great chance to keep their seat.

Overall, even though we made 6 wrong predictions, we learned a lot about why the predictions we made were either right or wrong. Toss ups are really hard to predict, especially when the point spread is .2, but we learned that we can’t just focus on what party the state leans towards and to focus more on how much money the candidates had and spent.  Usually the candidate with more money wins and we should have accounted that better into our decision making when we made our predictions. We learned a lot about the voting process and what to consider in voting for a candidate which was really helpful to someone who can vote this year and is just getting to understand politics.