Predicting the unpredictable

Congrats to the real winners! … FOIA some emails … And two in a row?!

Now that the election is (darn near) settled,¹ it’s time to congratulate the winners of our 2024 Election Prediction Contest.

But before we name-drop the victors of our six-way tie to be Arizona’s Top Predictor, let’s look at your predictions.

First of all, out of the 137² of you who took the time to fill out our full prediction survey, only two believed Kari Lake had a shot at winning the U.S. Senate race over Ruben Gallego.

Good call, folks!

The presidential race was a lot harder to predict. Only 44% of you thought Donald Trump would pull it off over Kamala Harris.

In Arizona’s three competitive congressional races³ the vast majority of you knew Democrat Jonathan Nez wouldn’t upset Republican U.S. Rep. Eli Crane in Northern Arizona’s Congressional District 2. But less than half of you predicted a victory for Republican U.S. Rep. David Schweikert in the Valley’s CD1. And you all were more bullish on Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s chances in Southern Arizona’s CD6 — roughly 55% of you correctly predicted he would win.

Three-quarters of you expected Republicans to pick up at least one seat on the Corporation Commission, but only about a quarter expected Republicans to make a clean sweep of all three seats up for grabs, as they did.

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At the state Legislature, there were some easy predictions and some hard ones.

The easiest were Republicans JD Mesnard and TJ Shope coasting to reelection in the state Senate representing Chandler and Pinal County, respectively. Almost 90% of you saw that coming. Same for Democratic Sen. Eva Burch, who held onto her seat in her competitive seat in Mesa.

On the other end of the spectrum, only 7% of you expected Republican Carine Werner to beat out Democratic Sen. Christine Marsh in their Phoenix/Scottsdale district. Quite the upset!

Slightly more of you foresaw Republican Sen. Shawnna Bolick’s victory over Democratic Rep. Judy Schwiebert in their central Phoenix district — about 28% correctly predicted that Senate race.

The state House races are notoriously hard to predict, considering they have two winners. But there were a few that were more obvious to you readers than others.

The vast majority of you correctly predicted Democrats holding both House seats in Mesa’s Legislative District 9.

But very few of you saw the clean sweep of the House seats in Phoenix/Scottsdale’s LD4.

But how did our state House and Senate predictions hold up, you ask?

Not great!

Earlier this year, we predicted Democrats would pick up one seat in the state Senate — they lost one. We were wrong about Bolick and Werner’s odds.

In the state House, we foresaw Republicans holding their 31-vote majority — in fact, they increased it to 33. We were wrong to think Yuma Republican Michele Peña would lose, that Democrat Kelli Butler would pull it off in her Phoenix/Scottsdale district.

Still, we did predict a Democratic pickup in Southern Arizona’s LD17, Republicans sweeping Chandler’s LD13 House seats and Republicans picking up the second House seat in Pinal County’s LD16.

Predicting elections is hard, and nobody called every race correctly.

But a few of you came close.

We had a six-way tie for most correct responses — predicting 25 winning candidates out of the 28 possible.

So congratulations to our winners:

🎉 Daniel Andrés Domínguez,⁴ 🪇 Tom Farley, 🥂 Andrew Knochel, 🎓 Josh Kredit, 🎊 Brian Murray 🍾 and Gregory Nelson 🎈(with an assist from Keith Brekhus).🪅

So, no fraud?: Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake released a concession-ish video where she didn’t acknowledge that she lost the race (or the last one). But she also didn’t call it rigged and she spoke about the election in the past tense, which is probably the best we’ll get. Meanwhile, Democrat Ruben Gallego is putting together his transition team, naming his current chief of staff and Arizona attorney Roy Herrera as co-chairs.

“As for me, well I can say for certain that truth will never stop mattering to me,” Lake said of her future plans.

He could have been a reporter: The Maricopa County Superior Court judge overseeing Attorney General Kris Mayes’ case prosecuting Arizona’s 2020 fake electors recused himself after getting busted for sending an email urging his colleagues to support Kamala Harris and condemn Donald Trump’s attacks on her. Republican state Rep. Travis Grantham tracked down the emails via a public records request, telling the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger that he had heard a rumor they existed.

"(I)t is time for me to state my piece or be complicit in the depravity," Judge Bruce Cohen wrote in the email.

Long study session: Mayes has been studying Project 2025 — a radical government reform proposal set out by Trump’s allies — “for months now,” KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports. Her office has been preparing legal strategies to fight various aspects of the plan, including abortion restrictions, deportations and ending the DACA program.

Focus on the silver lining: Progressive activists are feeling emboldened by their victory with Democrat Anna Hernandez’s election to the Phoenix City Council, hoping it’ll translate to more progressive city policies like a living wage ordinance and protections against evictions, the Republic’s Taylor Seely reports.

It’ll never end: The race for a Maricopa County Board of Supervisors seat representing Phoenix is so tight that it may head to a recount, KTAR’s Kevin Stone notes. Republican Kate Brophy McGee was leading by just over 300 votes, putting the race well within the state’s newly expanded threshold to spark a full recount. Down in Pima County, the Sheriff’s race between Democrat Chris Nanos and Republican Heather Lapin, a PCSO lieutenant who Nanos suspended in the final days of the campaign, is also currently close enough to spark an automatic recount. But there won’t be a recount in the Greenlee County District 1 supervisor race, even though there’s only a six-vote difference between the candidates, the Eastern Arizona Courier reports in a well-done correction. Under the old law, that margin would have triggered a recount, but the new law is based on a percentage difference that the candidates didn’t hit.

Among the many interesting folks attempting to get a job in the Trump White House is Scottsdale woman Melissa Rein Lively.

You may remember her pandemic-era viral video in which she has a mental health breakdown at Target while destroying a mask display and declaring herself a spokesperson for QAnon. (After a full image rehab tour, Lively now claims it wasn’t a mental health break, but an elaborate PR stunt.)

These days, she’s camped out in Florida, threatening to not leave unless she’s named Trump’s press secretary, per Politico.

If she gets the job, she would be the second consecutive Arizona woman to serve as Trump’s press secretary, following Stephanie Grisham.

1. If any additional races we asked you to predict flip, we’ll update our math and send more stickers to winners. But it’s looking increasingly unlikely.

2. It’s not a huge sample, but most congressional polls survey fewer than 500 people.

3. Saying there are three competitive congressional districts is being generous.

4. Domínguez is a prediction machine! We first met him many years ago when he won our prediction contest for the Yellow Sheet Report, beating out the state’s top lobbyists and consultants, and he has placed top-tier in every election prediction contest we’ve ever run.