Barack Obama Re-elected President

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.

Barack Obama
Elected President

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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