2024 US Presidential Election · Archive
4,001 people drew a map.
They picked the wrong president.
Harris
276
Consensus of all 4,001 maps
Trump
262
Blue clears 270. That’s the crowd’s call.
Presidential Pick’em ran from October 2024 through election night. Players filled in all 56 electoral contests: every state, plus the districts Maine and Nebraska split. Pool the 4,001 maps together, give each contest to whichever party most players picked, and you get a consensus forecast of Harris 276, Trump 262.
The actual result was 312–226 the other way. The crowd missed by 50 electoral votes and called the wrong winner. Only 41.7% of entrants had Trump reaching 270 at all.
- 4,631
- People signed up
- 4,001
- Maps submitted
- 763
- Private pools
- 109
- Perfect maps
3,151 maps came from signed-in accounts and 850 from anonymous players. 109 maps called all 56 contests correctly, 2.72% of entries.
The two maps
56 contests · 538 electoral votes
On the left, the map the crowd drew together. On the right, the one that happened. Darker means a wider margin. The four contests where they disagree on the winner are marked with hatching.
Margin, points
The four that decided it
50 electoral votes
The consensus map was correct in 52 of 56 contests. It was wrong in these four, which are worth exactly 50 electoral votes between them. Flip them and 262 becomes 312, the actual result to the vote.
-
Michigan
15 electoral votes
22.0%
863 players called it for Trump. 3,066 called it for Harris, most by under 1 point. Trump won it by 1–5 points.
-
Wisconsin
10 electoral votes
29.8%
1,171 players called it for Trump. 2,755 called it for Harris, most by under 1 point. Trump won it by under 1 point.
-
Pennsylvania
19 electoral votes
39.2%
1,541 players called it for Trump. 2,386 called it for Harris, most by under 1 point. Trump won it by 1–5 points.
-
Nevada
6 electoral votes
42.7%
1,679 players called it for Trump. 2,254 called it for Harris, most by under 1 point. Trump won it by 1–5 points.
Michigan is the sharpest miss on the board: 3,066 of 3,929 players who filled it in gave it to Harris.
Where the crowd was right
52 of 56 contests
The crowd didn’t get the whole map wrong. On safe seats it was close to unanimous, and it read the Sun Belt correctly: Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona all went to Trump on the consensus map. The blue wall is where it broke.
| Contest | Electoral votes | Called correctly | Won by |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | 54 | 97.3% | Harris |
| Kentucky | 8 | 96.9% | Trump |
| Alabama | 9 | 96.7% | Trump |
| Oklahoma | 7 | 96.3% | Trump |
| Arkansas | 6 | 96.2% | Trump |
| Tennessee | 11 | 96.1% | Trump |
| Mississippi | 6 | 95.9% | Trump |
| North Dakota | 3 | 95.9% | Trump |
How the scores fell
4,002 scored entries
Every map was scored contest by contest. The median entry landed at 424.8 points and the best at 526.25. Nearly everyone got the safe seats, so the scores bunch up near the top and the spread comes almost entirely from the four that mattered.
How it worked
Build notes
Players filled in an interactive electoral map, state by state, and set a confidence band on each call. Entries could be public or private, and anyone could spin up a pool and invite friends. People made 763 of them. Scores were computed against the certified result and posted to a global leaderboard alongside each pool’s own.
You didn’t need an account to play. 850 maps came in from anonymous players tracked by cookie, which is why there are more maps than a plain count of distinct users would suggest.
It’s a Flask app on a single EC2 instance, with MySQL on RDS and maps drawn in D3. The figures on this page come straight from the submission table and are frozen to a static file. The 2024 numbers can’t change, so there’s no point recomputing them on every visit.
- Ran
- October to November 2024
- Stack
- Flask · MySQL · D3 · Tailwind
- Contests per map
- 56
- Scored entries
- 4,002
- Best score
- 526.25 of 538
Next run
The game comes back in 2028.
Entries are closed and the 2024 board is final. Pools, brackets and the leaderboard stay up. If you played, your map is still there.