Time to announce the winner of The Hedgehog Report 2009 Election Prediction Contest.

Well there were only six predictions that included Bill Owens being victorious over Doug Hoffman. All of these predictions were done prior to Dede Scozzafava dropping out, so not of these predictions were anywhere close to final result. Therefore, in choosing a winner, we will look at only the Virginia and New Jersey Election Results.

The final numbers I will be using are the following:

VIRGINIA
Bob McDonnell 58.64%
Creigh Deeds 41.23%

NEW JERSEY
Chris Christie 48.9%
Jon Corzine 44.5%
Chris Dagget 5.7%

With the breakdown, the winner of The Hedgehog Report 2009 Election Prediction contest is….Big Joe. His prediction for the race was:

VIRGINIA
Bob McDonnell 58%
Creigh Deeds 42%

NEW JERSEY
Chris Christie 49%
Jon Corzine 44%
Chris Dagget 7%

This equates to a total percentage difference of 3.3%. The runners up are Michael T, who had a total percentage difference of 4.3% and DrJay, who had a total percentage difference of 5.1%. By the way, if fully rounded numbers were used for the final results, Big Joe would have also have been the top prediction, tied with Michael T.

Congratulations to Big Joe.

I never quite know how to follow Election night on this site. I thought about having separate posts for each state, but then it requires jumping around from post to post to keep. Therefore, I will be doing chronological posts as the night goes on. We have polls closing in Virginia at 7pm, New Jersey at 8pm, New York at 9pm and California at 11pm.

The polls have officially close in the first of the evenings contests in Virginia. This is merely a warm up for the better races later since the main races in this state seem to be foregone conclusions. My biggest interest is how big the margin is in each race, especially Governor and Attorney General. The other thing to watch is how many seats in the Virginia House the GOP manages to take away from the Democrats.

The official results from the Virginia State Board of Elections can be found here.

I will be surfing around the Internet and chiming in with new posts as they warrant. This should be a fun night.

Fairleigh Dickinson released a final poll for New Jersey showing Jon Corzine ahead of Chris Christie by 2%.

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (FDU)
Jon Corzine (D-inc) 43%
Chris Christie (R) 41%
Chris Daggett (I)

This poll is almost laughable in that FDU decided to do an 11-day poll and release it one day before the election. How can any serious pollster even consider that a legitimate poll? This poll was done October 22-November 1 among 1119 likely voters.

One pollster that seems to be missing in the closing days is Strategic Vision. After releasing polls about once a month or every other month for New Jersey, the last poll seen from them was released back on September 24th. They were also releasing polls about once a month for Georgia. Did the controversy scare them off from releasing any other polls?

Add Survey USA to the growing number of polls showing Chris Christie in the lead.

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (Survey USA)
Chris Christie (R) 45%
Jon Corzine (D-inc) 42%
Chris Daggett (I) 10%

This poll was done October 30-November 1 among 582 likely and actual voters. Among those already voted (14%), Corzine leads 50%-38%-9% with 2% of them still undecided even though they already voted. And to avoid creating another pointless Virginia thread, Survey USA shows Bob McDonnell cruising over The Washington Post Creigh Deeds by 18%.

GOVERNOR – VIRGINIA (Survey USA)
Bob McDonnell (R) 58%
Creigh Deeds (D) 40%

The Republicans for Attorney General and Lt. Governor are also dominating. This poll was done October 30-November 1 among 574 likely voters.

UPDATE (12:36pm): Monmouth University and Gannett have an update of their polling that contradicts every other poll out so far today and shows Jon Corzine ahead.

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (Monmouth/Gannett)
Jon Corzine (D-inc) 43%
Chris Christie (R) 41%
Chris Daggett (I) 8%

This poll was done October 31-November 1 among 722 likely voters. They are either going to look like geniuses or fools.

UPDATE (12:41pm): The polls are flying in now. Democracy Corps decides to join the side showing Corzine ahead.

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (Democracy Corps)
Jon Corzine (D-inc) 41%
Chris Christie (R) 37%
Chris Daggett (I) 15%

This poll was done October 29-November 1 among 606 likely voters. One thing to note is the Democracy Corps poll has a much earlier start date than some of the other polls out and may be missing the Christie surge.

So now we have polls ranging from a 6% Christie victory to a 4% Corzine victory. Unreal.

Less than one week ago, Quinnipiac University claimed Jon Corzine had surged to a 5% lead over Chris Christie in the race for New Jersey Governor. In less than one week, Chris Christie erased that deficit and now leads Corzine by 2% in today’s Quinnipiac poll.

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (Quinnipiac)
Chris Christie (R) 42%
Jon Corzine (D-inc) 40%
Chris Daggett (I) 12%

And to think, this was after Barack Obama. If you were a Democratic candidate, why would you even think of inviting Barack Obama to campaign for you. We saw Deeds completely collapse after Obama showed up and campaigned for him. And now the same thing has happened to Corzine. This poll was done October 27-November 1 among 1533 likely voters.

We’ll start off what should be a fun day of polling results with the new numbers released early this morning for Virginia from Public Policy Polling.

GOVERNOR – VIRGINIA (PPP)
Bob McDonnell (R) 56%
Creigh Deeds (D) 42%

And despite being called an embarrassment to the state of Virginia by The Washington Post, Ken Cuccinelli has an even bigger lead over his Democratic opponent than McDonnell.

ATTORNEY GENERAL – VIRGINIA (PPP)
Ken Cuccinelli (R) 55%
Steve Shannon (D) 39%

If you thought Creigh Deeds ran a negative campaign, you should have seen some of the TV ads from Steve Shannon trying to smear Cuccinelli over the past week or so. They made Deeds seem downright positive. If you detest negative campaign ads and wish for more positive approaches to campaigns, then you should be very happy at the way the races in Virginia turned out. McDonnell and Cuccinelli ran overly positive campaigns throughout while Deeds and Shannon went all-negative, all-the-time since the day they won their party nominations and in the end, the two Republicans appear to be cruising to easy victories. Unfortunately, I wish the same thing were happening in New Jersey, but I guess negative advertising does work in some places.

This poll was done October 30-November 2 among 1457 likely voters.

And here is the other poll everyone was waiting for tonight from Public Policy Polling.

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (PPP)
Chris Christie (R) 47%
Jon Corzine (D-inc) 41%
Chris Daggett (I) 11%

This poll was done October 31-November 1 among 994 likely voters.

I am going to bed and won’t be awake for the Virginia poll release that is supposed to come out at 1 am. I am sure tomorrow we will be getting a slew of final polls from just about everyone who is willing to stick their polling credibility on the line. It should be an interesting day and night leading into the fun on Tuesday.

While we wait for the latest polls from Public Policy Polling for New Jersey (11pm) and Virginia (Midnight), we did get polls for both states from YouGov. The Virginia poll puts McDonnell up by 13% while the New Jersey poll shows Corzine ahead by 2%.

GOVERNOR – VIRGINIA (YouGov)
Bob McDonnell (R) 53%
Creigh Deeds (D) 40%

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (YouGov)
Jon Corzine (D-inc) 43%
Chris Christie (R) 41%
Chris Daggett (I) 8%

Both polls were done October 27-30,among 743 likely voters in Virginia and 780 likely voters in New Jersey.

Another poll to add to the New Jersey mash up from Monmouth University and Gannet.

GOVERNOR – NEW JERSEY (Monmouth/Gannett)
Chris Christie (R) 43%
Jon Crozine (D-inc) 42%
Chris Daggett (I) 8%

This poll was done October 28-30 among 1041 likely voters.