My presidential predictions, the day after: I was close…

To start, I want to say that on the big question, I was right. Obama won. Granted, that wasn’t much of a prediction on my part (all hail Nate Silver and his glorious statistical models), but it was right nonetheless. On the question of Obama winning both New Hampshire and Virginia with Romney taking North Carolina, I was also right there, but not exactly in the way I stated. I expected Virginia to be called MUCH earlier. I had no idea it was going to be that close. On that same note, I expected Ohio to be called much later or still be up in the air this morning. Both of those predictions were based much more on gut feelings than actual science, which goes to show that when there’s good math involved, it’s probably better to go with the math than your gut.

The prediction for an early Virginia call may have also been wishful thinking on my part, because as much as I absolutely live for Election Day, I wanted to be able to tune out early for once. I suppose it was still relatively early–even Fox News called the race at about 11:15 pm ET, which I could say is only a little later than I’d predicted (I said it would be over by the time The Daily Show came on, and the call came about halfway through it), but the path was not what I thought it would be.

Oh, and I mentioned the Mustache Drinking Game. Yes, we played it! As it turns out, it makes you pay a LOT more attention to what’s going on. In the end, we didn’t quite play it as a game, but used it more as an auxiliary form of entertainment while we had a few social beers.  The picture in this post is one taken during Obama’s victory speech, after someone moved the mustache to intentionally line up with his face, which seemed like a hilarious thing to do at the time, and I’m still pretty amused by it. Mustaches may become a regular part of my Election Day repertoire.