Obama wins and Presidential Electoral Simulation predicts it

The current count for President-elect Obama has turned to 364 electoral votes now that North Carolina has finally clicked into the Democratic column. I was waiting for that to happen before I could crow about how my prediction of 364, based on the InTrade prediction markets, was correct. Honestly, I just used their data and made some pretty pictures and simulations to assuage my curiosity over just what the chances of a Democratic victory were.

I see that the great fivethirtyeight.com missed by those 15 electoral votes. In all seriousness, they seemed to have called much of everything else correctly, especially the popular vote.

Now to the transition team. President-Elect Obama picking Rahm Emanuel to be his Chief of Staff caused one of the submitters at Fark to quip:

"Obama officially offers the Chief of Staff spot to Rahm Emanuel. So they've got Matt Santos and Josh Lyman, now they just need CJ and Toby"

For West Wing fans who know that Josh Lyman's character was based on Rahm Emanuel and noticed the parallels of this election to the final election in the West Wing series, this is quite humorous.