Princeton Election Consortium

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 →]

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.

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 the values talk is a misinterpretation of a bad question. The article argues that it was essentially terrorism (i.e. 9/11) that swung it for Bush. The article is print only - go get it. The December 6 issue.

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 essential problem is that the largest e-voting counties have large populations and have no counterpart for comparison. I believe that this problem is insurmountable by any statistical analysis, no matter how sophisticated.

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 were more certain than the one-week snapshot indicated, and outlier polls tended to introduce occasional inaccuracies. A more sophisticated averaging procedure is needed, one that uses more polls but gives more weight to recent ones.

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

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 border states, I wouldn’t expect anyone to have bothered to tamper with vote totals there, so a comparison could be instructive.” This is excellent. If any of you has this information I would be very interested.

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 big negative). Religion didn’t matter any more than in 2000, nor did rural voters. Terror, terror, terror. Combined with the Mellman article cited below I surmise that Bush’s job approval rating was boosted by perceptions about his ability to counter terrorism.

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), what about the relatively simple hypothesis that the economy’s not that bad combined with loyalty to a wartime president?

Despite all this, the true margin of victory was about 150,000 votes in Ohio, and even smaller margins in Wisconsin and New Hampshire. As I said during the campaign, Electoral College mechanisms (essentially because of increased clustering of Bush supporters) gave Kerry an approximately 2% advantage compared with the popular vote. Thus the difference between the Meta-margin above and the popular vote margin.

I continue to be deluged by email on the subject of the anomalies in Florida voting in small counties. As I said below, these data sort fairly well by the rural/urban divide. In a graph by Jeff Chambers that there may be some small remaining anomaly. However, this could be ballot spoilage. Here’s an analysis demonstrating the size of the anomaly. I don’t think this is going anywhere. The most constructive thing at this point is to redirect energies to voting reforms, such as those advocated by the Open Voting Consortium. This has the advantage of serving all Americans.

In the coming days I will revisit polling data to see what the turning points were in the election, as measured through the Electoral College. I suspect that some of the shifts in my data that I could not explain may be explained by campaign moves that were not obvious at the level of national media. The electoral vote calculation is low-noise and captures swings well, so this is a perfect use for it.