Friday, May 9, 2008

Mr. Super Endorses, and We Predicted Him Correctly!

UPDATED (5/10)

The superdelegate behind the blog Mrsuper.org was revealed in the past few days to be Ed Espinoza, a member of the DNC from California. Several weeks ago, when he was still anonymous, Mr. Super expressed interest in this web site's predictions, even noting that he had found his own name in our list of estimates.

Well, Mr. Super has evidently declared his support for Barack Obama and guess what? The model predicted his endorsement correctly! He was actually in the "unclear" range for the model, but the estimate was that his probability of supporting Obama was .56.

By my count, 15 (updated from 10) previously undeclared superdelegates have announced their support since May 6th and the model has gotten 12 (updated from 8) of them correct so far.* Here is the list:


* Two other superdelegates who had already declared for Clinton switched their endorsement to Obama. However, the model is not set up to predict who will switch sides, just to predict who undeclared superdelegates will support. There is also some debate about whether Ellsworth had endorsed Clinton or not. For now, I'll punt on this one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's tempting to let you off the hook on mispredicting Shuler by a large margin, because I doubt the model could predict "Whichever way my district votes" ahead of time.