Unforeseen Contingencies

In December of last year "we" predicted that Barack Obama would narrowly defeat Mitt Romney in the race for president.  Our guess scientific econometric forecast that Romney would be the Republican candidate was based on some extremely sophisticated data analysis and modeling.  We also noted that Romney was the only one with organization and money, and that he was the only one left in the race who wasn't an overt kook.

That Obama would win narrowly was a harder piece of the prediction, but given his position as incumbent, the relative peace within the Democratic Party, the boringness of Mitt Romney, and the ability of Republican social conservatives to scare the hell out of the rest of us, plus a lot of extremely sophisticated data analysis and modeling, we concluded Obama would have the edge.  We were right.

(I should note that so far we are batting 100% on our end-of-year predictions!)

Further analysis: I think it's obvious that Republican social conservatives were instrumental in Obama's victory.  The race was extremely close; Washington Post lists Obama as having a bare majority of the vote at 50.4%.  Obama appears to have done much better among women voters, despite Romney's apparent earlier gains with women, and more women voted than men.  Religious maniacs like Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin, with their talk of "legitimate rape" and how it's God's will if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant, well, they are simply scary.  In a tight race, it only takes a small number of people to react to such madmen to make a difference.  (BTW, the nutty Ron Paul was the one to get this idiocy started with his "honest rape.")

I'll cover the destructiveness of social conservatives further in another post, but for now I'll simply note with delight that now we are assured it's God's will for Obama to have been reelected, and hence it also appears God is on the side of Unforeseen Contingencies' predictions.  Now it's off to the stock market!

Photo: a rare shot of Unforeseen Contingencies chief blogger Charles N. Steele hard at work in the Unforeseen Contingencies econometric forecasting lab.