2009 NJ Governor's Election Prediction

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So as i said in my earlier post from this morning, my project for my 'Elections and Participation' course at Rutgers this semester was to predict the voter turnout rate and who will win in Somerset County (and with what proportion).

I just submitted our prediction, and we predict a tight race between Christie and Corzine in Somerset County, with the following percentages:

Jon Corzine - 47%
Chris Christie - 45%
Chris Daggett - 8%

for the voter turnout aspect, we predict: around a 55% turnout rate of the REGISTERED voters (not voting age population). There are 193,345 registered voters right now in Somerset county, so 55% of that would be: 106,340.

I'll update later in the week with our explanation for the basis of our prediction as i'm still organizing all of our information. Or perhaps when i take a look at the actual results for comparison. I forgot to mention in the earlier post that that is also part of our assignment. When we present next week, we also have to include the actual results, and how much the actual results varied from our predictions and possible reasons and whatnot. So at this point, our assignment is only partly over.

This was (is) definitely a fun, interesting (and hard!) assignment, and I'm quite anxious to see the results tomorrow.

On a general state level prediction, i think Corzine will end up winning (but with a very small margin) the election.

again, a quick reminder : don't forget to go out and vote tomorrow!

UPDATE (7:45 AM on 11/03/09): the grad student that teaches our course sent out the overall predictions from our class, summing up all the counties. Here's the data:


The class expects to see approximately 2,643,282 votes tomorrow (51% of registered
voters) and the final tally to divide statewide:
Corzine: 45.95% of the vote
Christie: 41.65% of the vote
Daggett: 6.21% of the vote


It'll be interesting to see how close we got as a class - as political science students!


Based on an anonymous class vote taken in class yesterday:
80% expect Corzine to win the election
20% expect Christie to win the election


And:
65% would vote for Corzine
20% would vote for Christie
14% would vote for Daggett
1% would vote for Evgeni Malkin (i asked my brother who this was.... because i had no idea... and it's apparently a hockey player).