The Roberts Nomination, Part II: Full Senate

John Roberts is now Chief Justice of the United States. (Senate roll call vote.) That he was confirmed comes as a surprise to no one, but the precise tally in the Senate (78-22) was harder to predict. Subtracting the easier prediction of 55 Republican senators voting to confirm, Senate Democrats split 23-22 in favor of Chief Justice Roberts. All predictions have been translated into a number of Democratic votes, on this basis, for ease of comparison.

Marshall of Confirm Them was quite pessimistic, predicting no more than 4 Democrats would vote to confirm. He misses by 19 Senators.

Alexander K. McClure of PoliPundit similarly predicted that only 5 (+/-2) Democrats would vote to confirm. He misses by 18 Senators.

Pat Buchanan on the inimitable McLaughlin Group predicted that only 7 Democrats would vote to confirm. He misses by 16 Senators.

Robert Novak predicted that fewer than 8 Democrats would vote to confirm. He misses by 15 Senators.

Dean of Right Wing Think Tank predicted that fifteen Democrats would vote to confirm. He misses by 8 Senators.

Though a less precise prediction, Eleanor Clift's statement on the McLaughlin Group that Roberts would get "at least half the Democrats on the Senate floor" is looking eerily good, given that he recieved 23/45 or one vote more than half. Incorporating her two predictions that he'd get 0/8 Democrats on the Judiciary committee but at least 23/45 on the floor, she predicted a range of 23-37, averaging 30 Democrats, putting her almost alone in predicting more votes to confirm than were actually recorded. She misses by 7 Senators.

Joy-Ann Reid of the Reid Report was much more precise, predicting that 17 Democrats would vote to confirm. She misses by 6 Senators.

Mark Coffey at Decision '08 and came even closer, predicting that 18 Democrats would vote to confirm. He misses by 5 Senators.

Daffyd Hugh of Big Lizards nailed this one, predicting the final tally would be in the range of 75-80 votes to confirm (20 to 25 Democrats). This puts him within Half a Senator. Congratulations, Daffyd.

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One last punditary prediction to chew on: On his July 29th episode, John McLaughlin gave as his prediction of the week: "Judge Roberts will become the head of the Supreme Court -- Chief Justice." Recalling that this was over a month before Chief Justice Rehnquist died, and that the topic of the show was the nomination of Roberts for Associate Justice, this was quite an audacious prediction. Kudos, Mr. McLaughlin, for showing us how the pros do it.

The Roberts Nomination, Part I: Judiciary Committee

The Judiciary Committee vote is in. Judge Roberts won approval 13-5, with all ten Republicans and three of the eight Democrats. Ranking Member Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) crossed the aisle to support Judge Roberts.

A substantial number of prognosticators predicted a 10-8 straight party line vote. These range from major-league pundit Robert Novak to bloggers Marshall of Confirm Them, Dean of the Right Wing Think Tank, and Ellis Wyatt at Dump Dick Durbin. All of these missed by a solid 3 senators.

Daffyd Hugh formerly of Captain's Quarters, now with his own blog Big Lizards managed to do even worse, predicting that Roberts would win 17-1, with only Senator Kennedy voting against. He misses by a full 4 senators.

In a direct response to Daffyd's post, Matt Margolis of Blogs for Bush predicted the opposite -- at most one or two Democratic senators voting to confirm. Calling this a prediction of 11-7, Matt missed by only 2 senators. Intriguingly, he discusses six of the eight democrats specifically, and the two the he omits (Kohl and Feingold) both voted to confirm.

Finally, Mark Coffey of Decision '08 predicted six Democrats on the committee would vote against. This would correspond to 12-6, putting him only 1 senator from precision punditry. Well done, Mark.

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Note: all of these predictions were made publicly after the bulk of the testimony of Judge Roberts before the Committee and before senators began to announce how they would vote, roughly between the fifteenth and nineteenth of this month.

Getting Started...

Eventually, I plan to use this blog to record and highlight the kinds of Mainstream Media predictions that get things spectacularly wrong, from the 10,000 Katrina victims to the Famine in Afghanistan and Saddam's Last Stand in Baghdad (and, to be bipartisan, the mass stores of WMDs we were supposed to find in Iraq).

But, I don't plan on drawing a strong distinction between newspaper op-ed pundits, television pundits, and prominent blog-pundits. In today's world, those distinctions simply don't exist -- see, for example, Washington Post op-ed columnist Charles Krauthammer on FoxNews commenting on the President's post-Katrina address, or columist Ann Althouse writing her own weblog.

To kick off the site, I'm going to cover concrete predictions of Democratic support for the confirmation of Justice Roberts, starting with the Judiciary Committee vote.

With 20-20 Hindsight

Pundits, pollsters and policy wonks of all kinds make predictions all the time. And yet, they are rarely judged on the accuracy of their past predictions. The idea of this site is to look at predictions made a year ago (or perhaps a few years ago) the accuracy of which, with 20-20 hindsight, is now clear.

Let the games begin.