Popular electoral prediction site FiveThirtyEight.com has wasted no time since the end of the 2008 election in issuing predictions for the next several cycles. FiveThirtyEight’s founder, Nate Silver, says that he predicts with 97.2% confidence that, in 2020, Anti-Federalist candidate Bill Warkinson will win every state but Guam and West Dakota.
Warkinson, who is currently the Sanitation Commissioner of Duluth, MN, said he was stunned by the projection. “I had never really considered national politics,” he said, musing over his options. “But if it’s gonna happen whether I want it to or not, well hell, next cycle might be the time to run for the House after all. I’ve started thinking about campaign slogans. ‘Nobody cleans up a shitty mess better than Bill Warkinson!’ … It’s a work in progress.”
Also posted were projections as far down the line as 2064. Although projected winner Pablo Jarvis has not yet been born, his victory seems certain, says Silver in his analysis of the data. “His parents have not yet met,” Silver writes, “and yet their marriage is as clearly a part of their destiny as their inevitable divorce. When he is five, his parents will buy him a puppy which he will name Sparky, and after the divorce, his father will get dog visitation rights. At age 8, Jarvis will stop publicly eating his boogers, though he will always continue to do so in private.”
Silver’s predictions have become so accurate that some voting precincts now accept his estimates as the official total. “If he’s just going to be so damn accurate, why would we waste our time counting ballots when we could be at home constantly refreshing FiveThirtyEight?” asked Bucks County, PA Election Commissioner Rory Walsh.
“I don’t plan on voting ever again,” said former voter Janine Murphy, of Reno, NV. “What’s the point? History is already written, and it’s pointless to try and stop it. It’s all a part of Silver’s—ah, I mean, God’s—plan.”
We asked Silver if he was concerned about the paradoxical dangers of self-fulfilling prophecies, but he could not hear us over the buzzing hum of his time machine’s flux capacitor.
