Princeton Election Consortium

Today we have a news story about the state-by-state spending patterns by the two campaigns. McCain is focusing on battleground states, while Obama is spreading resources more broadly. At first this may seem odd. But it makes sense in terms of voter power - and relates to a recent change I made in defining the [...]

[Read more →]

After a hiatus to do real work, I am back. This site really needs to be reorganized, and perhaps written up as a proper print article. In the meantime, I promised to describe the pre-election Fox News interview…

[Read more →]

Several interesting and good articles about exit polls. Here is a piece in the Washington Post about demystification of exit polls. Also, in this week’s New Yorker is a great article by Louis Menand on a meeting that took place at Stanford at which pollsters discussed the interpretation of this year’s results. Essentially, they think [...]

[Read more →]

Election results can be displayed in many ways. The cartograms used on this site are a way of displaying electoral votes accurately. To see displays done by population or on a county-by-county basis, see these interesting maps.

[Read more →]

I am moving my post-election comments on Florida here. This is partly to maintain order and partly because I am starting to wonder whether there is a story here. After chewing over the Berkeley group’s analysis and corresponding with some of you, I have thought of reasons why there is no real county-level anomaly. The [...]

[Read more →]

Some notes on future improvements to the calculation. David Kline points out that to calculate the single-state probabilities, for small (<30) numbers of polls, a t-distribution is more appropriate than a normal distribution. This distribution has longer tails and will give less certainty in the estimates. Going in the converse direction, in retrospect some states [...]

[Read more →]

Footage of my appearance on Fox News: [2 MB version] [30 MB] [200 MB]

[Read more →]

Regarding the ongoing Florida voting fraud controversy, S. Doershuk, who has expertise in demography, makes a constructive suggestion: “It might be instructive to examine some similar counties in Georgia and Alabama, particularly those which border on north FL, to see if the same pattern can be found. Given the ‘bright red’ nature of both [...]

[Read more →]

This is really interesting: a rundown of exit poll breakdowns by gender, education, issue, and so on. It seems to refute ideas that have been going around about the importance of religion and rural voters. The upshot seems to be that the biggest positive for Bush was terrorism (as opposed to Iraq, which was a [...]

[Read more →]

Here is a pre-election article by Kerry consultant Mark Mellman that predicted Bush’s popular vote share to within 0.1%. Going by the article, the factors that went into the calculation included job approval, the economy, war, and right track/wrong track sentiment. Putting aside the talk about values (based on a single poorly-worded exit poll question), [...]

[Read more →]