Presidential Election Results 2012: Electoral College Swing State Vote Results and Surprises

The presidential election results were a huge surprise. Or completely expected. It depends on whose predictions you trusted.

For Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, everything went as expected. Silver predicted Obama would take every swing state except North Carolina, and he did.

(Florida's votes are still being counted, but so far, Obama is winning).

The Rust Belt was safely in Obama's pocket early in the night. Michigan was called early for the president, and Pennsylvania quickly followed suit, presaging the night's events.

Nearly everyone called those states for Obama, except for one or two right-leaning polling firms and Fox News pundits Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich, who both predicted Romney landslides.

New Hampshire was the first true swing state to fall to Obama. Recent polls there showed Obama up slightly, but that was only after a few rocky weeks after the first presidential debate, when Romney led in several polls, as well as the polling average.

Virginia held on late into the night, with Romney leading for hours until many Democratic ballots in urban areas were finally counted, pushing Obama to a narrow but secure victory there. Polls were nearly evenly divided in Virginia, but the average few just slightly to Obama.

North Carolina went to Romney, though not immediately after polls closed. While it wasn't a landslide for Romney, his margin was bigger than Obama's margin in most swing states. Almost all the polls, except for the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, predicted this one in Romney's favor.

Iowa, again following the polls, went for Obama, as did Wisconsin and Nevada. None of these states ever saw a Romney lead during the campaign, but Obama's advantage was always small, and often within the margin of error.

Colorado was as close as Virginia, but it eventually wound up an Obama victory, just as the polls predicted.

And Ohio, which did decide the race this year, went for Obama, which shouldn't have been a surprise, since every poll in the state for the three weeks prior to the election showed Obama in the lead, except for polls from Rasmussen.

As for me, my predictions for the Electoral College were off in three states: Colorado, Virginia and Florida. All three were difficult calls for me to make, but I erred on the side of "balance." Let that be a lesson: always go with the numbers.