Andrew Gelman, who writes at Statistical modeling, has a quick summary of what took place over on his redbluerichpoor site. The two take-away thoughts for me:
1) The red state/blue state divisions haven’t been redrawn. There was simply a general shift across the board away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats:
Update: See also More on the shift from Republican to Democrat.
2) Nate Silver, at fivethirtyeight.com, did a pretty good job of aggregating the polls to predict what would happen, at least for those states in the middle:
I’ll leave the question over whether Nate’s aggregation technique was optimal to the experts.
The overall result may not be in doubt, but spare a thought for Andrew Laming (Liberal, incumbant) and Jason Young (Labor) in the Queensland seat of Bowman.
Before the election, Laming held the seat with an 8.9% margin. It was safe, but not that safe and by the time of the election, the betting markets were leaning towards Labor (thank you, Simon Jackman). Turnout on the day was 85.25%. With those votes counted, the primary count went to Laming (33,833 vs. 32,498), but the two-candidate preferred count is going to Young (36,693 vs. 36,672).
That’s a margin, on current counting, of just 0.014%.
The pre-poll, postal, absent and progressive votes are still being counted, but you’ve got to feel for those guys. If Laming hasn’t worn holes in the carpet then I’m a monkey’s uncle.
Update 29 Nov 2007: With a bit under 2,000 extra votes counted, Young appears to have squeezed a little extra traction from one fingernail. He’s now got a margin of 0.040% (37,690 vs. 37,630).
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