Here are the winners of The Downballot's 2025 election prediction contest, sponsored by Green's Babka!
Congratulations to our victorious champions!
With New York City’s Board of Elections finally releasing certified election results last week, we can officially close the books on the 2025 elections. And you know what that means: It’s time to unveil the winners of The Downballot’s prediction contest, sponsored by Green’s Bakery!
As you may recall, we asked you to guess the winners of 13 races, ranging from marquee gubernatorial matchups to deep-cut ballot measures, with each correct answer worth one point.
We also asked you to guess the number of seats that Democrats would win in the Virginia House of Delegates, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and the Georgia Public Service Commission.
Finally, as a tiebreaker, we asked you to guess the share of the vote that Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, and Curtis Silwa would receive in New York City’s mayoral race.
We’re delighted to announce that Jason S. earned the top prize with a score of 20 points! We also had a multi-way tie at 19 points for the three other winning slots. By virtue of having the best tiebreaking score, Al took second place. Coming in third was AWildLibAppeared, and rounding out our prize-winners was Sy_Ableman. Each winner will receive babka (and other treats) from our friends at Green’s Bakery!
We also extend an honorable mention to Matt S., who had the best score on our tie-breaker question, guessing the vote shares of the three major candidates in New York City’s mayoral election with a total error of just 2.2 percentage points!
Because our operations are reader-supported, only paid subscribers to The Downballot were eligible for glory—and prizes—in our contest. To see how you did (both overall and on each question), a full list of scores is available here.
Thanks again to all who entered, and a special thank you to our generous sponsor, Green’s Bakery! We’ll be in touch with the winners shortly to arrange for the delivery of your delicious baked goods.
And if you missed out this time, don’t worry: We’ll be hosting more contests in the future. Just be sure to upgrade to a paid subscription to ensure you have a shot at victory—and babka!




Damn looking at the spreadsheet to see what happened as someone who could not play because the subscriber wall, I would have beaten everyone who actually played