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Barack Obama has been re-elected President of the United
States of America. After 4 years that many thought showed too little
progress toward the goals of economic recovery and full employment,
President Obama won after an intense campaign against Mitt Romney.
The story is complex, but it appears that Obama won a substantisl majority of
racial minority voters, and was chosen by a large majority of women.
The election was called for the President shortly after 11 pm.
Governor Romney called Obama to offer his congratulations at about 1 am
and The President gave his victory speech half an hour later.
The GCP prediction for this momentous event was set for
the 24 hour period beginning at 15:00 Eastern time (20:00
UTC) on November 6th, following the previous election's specification exactly.
This includes several hours of
election day in the US, and enough time for the votes to be
counted to determine the winner of the election (assuming
the margin is not razor thin), and continues until
most of the world has awakened to begin a day with a new US President-elect.
The formal data segment overall shows a generally
positive trend through the 24 hour period, albeit with several strong
subtrends.
Chisquare is 86989.3 on 86400 df, for p = 0.079 and Z =
1.414. This represents a relatively large effect size
compared with the average of Z = 0.33 over the full GCP
database, and it is very similar to the outcome of the 2008 election.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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