Category: Modeling
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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 […]
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Is Electability Real?
One of the biggest flashpoints in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries was the notion of electability. Candidate after candidate was assessed by primary voters on the basis of who would be most likely to win the general election against Donald Trump, and entire campaigns floundered or surged around their answers to the question. Critics of […]
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Our 2018 House Wins-Above-Replacement Model, and the 2022 Implications
In today’s era of hyperpolarization, the single most accurate predictor of a district’s congressional vote is the presidential lean of the seat. As we previously analyzed here at Split Ticket, 97% of a district’s 2020 congressional vote could be explained simply by its presidential lean that year. With this in mind, it is likely that […]