By Mr R Pathak, Head of History and Politics

With the dust now finally beginning to settle in the aftermath of the most acrimonious presidential election in modern American history and with the transition to a new occupant of the White House in full swing, the time is right to announce the result of our presidential prediction competition.

The challenge was to correctly predict the exact allocation of electoral college votes, which involved identifying which swing states would opt for Joe Biden and which would support Donald Trump. This was no easy task, given the many different factors- both local and national- that can influence voting across the fifty states.
 

As in 2016, many expert pollsters under-estimated support for Trump and I fell into this trap, wildly exaggerating the margin of Biden’s victory. It must be said that the other members of the Politics Department fared equally badly but in our defence, surely our job is to make sense of what has happened not what might happen in the future; and we were closer in our predictions than many other psephologists! In the end, out of the approximately 50 entries, only two individuals correctly predicted the exact outcome in the electoral college; the first was the Headmaster and the second was Tegan C in Year 9.

Well done to our joint winners and an exciting book on US politics - Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop- The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America by Lee Drutman- is on its way to Tegan.