tournament selection process, the B.C.S. rankings in NCAA college football, the NBA, and Major League Baseball matters ranging from the 2011 attendance at the New York Mets' Citi Field to the historic 2011 collapse of the Boston Red Sox. The site has also posted forecasts for the Academy Awards. In addition, FiveThirtyEight sometimes turned its attention to other topics, such as the economics of blogging, the financial ratings by Standard & Poors, economists' tendency to underpredict unemployment levels, and the economic impact and media coverage of Hurricane Irene (2011). FiveThirtyEight published a graph showing different growth curves of the news stories covering Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests. Silver pointed out that conflicts with the police caused the sharpest increases in news coverage of the protests and assessed the geography of the protests by analyzing news reports of the size and location of events across the United States. 2012 U.S. elections FiveThirtyEight rolled out its 2012 general election forecasting model on June 7, 2012. The model forecast both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, with the latter being central to the exercise and involving a forecast of each state. In the initial forecast, Barack Obama was estimated to have a 61.8% chance of winning the electoral vote. The website provided maps and statistics about the electoral outcomes in each state as well as nationally. Later posts addressed methodological issues such as the "house effects" of different pollsters as well as the validity of telephone surveys that did not call cell phones. On the morning of November 6, Election Day, Silver's model gave President Obama a 90.9% chance of winning a majority of the electoral votes. The 538 model correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Silver, along with at least two academic-based analysts who aggregated polls from multiple pollsters, thus not only correctly predicted all 50 states, but also all nine "swing states". In contrast, individual pollsters were less successful. For example, Rasmussen Reports "missed on six of its nine swing-state polls". An independent analysis of Silver's state-by-state projections, assessing whether the percentages of votes that the candidates actually received fell within the "margin of error" of Silver's forecasts, found that "48 out of 50 states actually fell within his margin of error, giving him a success rate of 96%. And assuming that his projected margin of error figures represent 95