PHILADELPHIA — A few hours before Hillary Clinton addressed the Democratic convention here, Virginia Reps. Bobby Scott and Don Beyer were standing in a hallway of the Wells Fargo Arena, in front of a big screen set up by Microsoft. The screen had an electoral map of the United States on it. The operator set it to a neutral position where each party begins with about 200 electoral votes and all the swing states — Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, etc. — are in gray. Then you touch each swing state to turn it blue or red until you have a final electoral guess.
Beyer went first. He made most of the swing states blue and came up with a final prediction of Clinton 320 and Trump 218. Going next, Scott came up with an exact replay of the 2012 numbers, with Clinton 332 and Trump 206.
“I think the Democratic vote in those states will hold,” Scott told me. “The people who voted for Barack Obama are certainly not going to turn around and vote for Donald Trump. And so I think we can hold the states that we have and possibly pick up Arizona and North Carolina.”
The operator said about 250 people came by to fill out the map over the course of the convention. Microsoft said the aggregate score of all those guesses was 314 for Clinton and 224 for Trump.
Here’s the kicker: Microsoft had the same screen at the Republican convention in Cleveland. The aggregate score of the rougly 450 Republicans who filled out the map was Clinton 285 to Trump 253. So Republicans predicted Trump would lose, too.
