Three days before the election, time to write down my election predictions.

Based upon what I have seen of the polls, campaigns and futures market actions of the 2008 presidential election, my predictions of the events of election night are thus,

-- The Democratic party candidates will win the election with room to spare, by at least 5 million popular votes and at least 100 electoral college votes.

-- The election will be called correctly by at least three mainstream 24-hour newsmedia channels before the polls close in the Mountain time zone.

-- There will be multiple allegations of vote fraud in the battleground states; they will ultimately not be sufficient in quantity of affected voters to question the validity of the president-elect.

-- News of vote fraud will be made public faster and more broadly than in any previous election, thanks in part to the advent of popular online video and netroots movements to place videographers at polling stations.

-- The Republican Party candidates will not concede the election before polls close in the Pacific time zone.

-- The Democratic Party will gain at least 7 seats in the Senate, and 25 in the House of Representatives.


Those being my predictions, I'd like to close by noting that the concept of predicting the future with certainty is folly as a claim to knowledge of the outcomes of future events is nothing more than sentiment with no value farther than interest on an “I told you so” or on an embarrassing retraction depending on its accuracy. Futurism is not about making quantifiable predictions like some fortune-teller, but rather to develop likely scenarios of potential future events in order that they can be prepared for. The predictions I make today are of little use in this respect, other than pointing out a few interesting topics to follow in the news on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008.

-Craig Blaylock
10:06:24 PM 11/01/08