Category: Modeling
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What’s Going On With Trafalgar’s Polls?
Over the last two presidential cycles, the Trafalgar Group rose to fame for its polling, which yielded better-than-average results for Republicans and indicated closer races for Donald Trump than many other outlets predicted. Trafalgar partly attributes those numbers to its “social desirability metric”, which the firm claims adjusts for respondents, especially conservatives, answering the way […]
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The Gender Gap in American Politics
Virtually every partisan divergence in the modern American political era has been analyzed under the microscope, especially since the election of Donald Trump. This is especially true when evaluating divergences along racial, regional, and education-based lines. Perhaps one of the more under-analyzed splits has been the difference in voting patterns between men and women; an […]
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Is It Normal For Young Voters To Be This Democratic?
“To be conservative as a young person means that one has no heart, but to be liberal as an old person means that one has no brain”.The above quote is one of the oldest notions in politics, and it conveys the expectation that young voters, who consistently display the most liberal social attitudes, vote overwhelmingly […]
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How Much More Ticket-Splitting Do Governor Races Have?
The notion that voters are far more willing to cross party lines for statewide offices than for federal positions is one of the most-commonly held viewpoints in politics today. It’s a point reinforced by scores of data that we do have; there’s little chance that ultra-popular GOP governor Charlie Baker would be winning a Senate […]
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Revisiting Q Scores
A while back, Split Ticket introduced a new metric to quantify the relative conservatism of a political region, as defined by educational, racial, and political statistics. This was dubbed the Q-score, and it had the highest magnitude among populist white working-class areas that used to be swingy or Democratic, such as southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, […]
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How Important Is Presidential Lean In Midterm Years?
Introduction Previous Split Ticket research indicates that a district’s presidential lean is the single greatest predictor of its House result in a presidential year. Polarization has only reinforced this conclusion, causing the total number of “crossover” seats to shrink significantly over the last two decades. (Read more here) Since there is no sign that this […]
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Where Do Trends Favor Each Party?
The most common way to look at election shifts is to look at county-level swing. This is the standard, accepted tool in virtually every form of analysis, and it is quite easy to compute: for each county, simply take the margin in one election and subtract it from the margin in another. For instance, if […]
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America and the Abortion Debate
Over the last fifty years, perhaps no single issue in American politics has been as hotly debated as abortion. Since the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which determined that a woman’s right to an abortion was constitutionally protected, the issue has become a flashpoint subject to increasing debate and, as partisanship accelerates, increasing polarization. […]
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Quantifying Conservatism
When Brian Kemp launched his 2018 campaign for governor, his first ad caught everyone’s eye. With promises to “blow up” government spending, a massive truck that he claimed would be used to “round up criminal illegals and take ’em home”, and a gun pointed at his daughter’s boyfriend that “no one [was] taking away”, Kemp’s […]
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The Declining Value of a Dollar
I need a dollar (dollar), a dollar is what I need…And if I share with you my story, would you share your dollar with me? The lyrics above are really to the 2010 Aloe Blacc song “I Need a Dollar”, but they might as well be from a desperate text sent by electoral candidates and […]