January 5, 2009

Finally….Election Pool Winners!

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FINALLY….ELECTION POOL WINNERS!….Back in October I held a pool to guess the results of the November election. With Al Franken now the official winner of the Minnesota senate race (officially enough for me, anyway), I can finally declare a winner.

Two winners, actually. Here’s how things broke down:

  • Obama won 365 electoral votes, but nobody got that exactly right. (Thanks, Nebraska!) So I rounded up all the people who predicted 364 electoral votes.

  • Democrats won 257 House seats and 59 Senate seats (counting the two independents). However, none of the folks in the 364 pool got that exactly right.

  • But two people came close. Professional prognosticator Sam Wang (founder of the Princeton Election Consortium) guessed 257 House seats and 58 Senate seats, while James Shearer predicted 260 House seats and 59 Senate seats.

Congratulations, James and Sam! A free subscription to Mother Jones is yours for the asking. Just email me your address and I’ll get you signed up.

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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