Ideological Cartography: Recent Episodes
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The upper panel plots the proportion of funds raised from pro-life versus pro-choice sources against candidate positions on the standard liberal-conservative scale. The circle sizes are scaled to the percentage of donors that have given to pro-life/pro-choice political organizations. The circles are colored coded based on candidacy status. Those who have officially announced their candidacy […]
Here is a link to my Boston Review article published as part of a forum on campaign-finance reform titled Leadership, Free to Lead.
The Washington Post recently published an article on money blurts which has also been discussed at The Monkey Cage and elsewhere. I’ve done some research on this topic, so I thought I would recycle a plot of Joe Wilson’s donors before and after his outburst. The figure shows the ideology of Joe Wilson’s contributors leading up to […]
(Co-written with Kevin Collins) What will the field of candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination look like? Presidential primaries tend to highlight divisions within parties, and the press has focused on moderates versus conservatives, social conservatives versus business conservatives, party insiders versus Tea Party insurgents, electable candidates versus long shots. Some commentators, notably Nate […]
The New York Times published a fascinating article last week about the changing politics of physicians. The article reports that as more physicians abandon practices for salaried positions their politics have trended to the left. This trend is also present in the contribution patterns of health care professionals. The figure below tracks the changes across time […]
The Wisconsin Supreme Court election between Justice David Prosser and Assistant Attorney General JoAnn Kloppenburg has received more media attention than any state judicial election in recent memory. The race was extremely close, but following the tide-turning discovery of 14,000 unrecorded votes from Waukesha County, a Prosser victory now appears all but certain. A challenge […]
Now that the dust from the 2010 Elections has cleared, it is time to start looking at how the 112th Congress will compare to the 111th. The figure below tracks the ideological positions of the median House member, the mean Democrat, and the mean Republican since 1988. The replacement effect of the 2010 Midterm Elections […]
As promised, here are my predictions for the 2010 Midterm Elections. The model parts with poll-based forecasting models in predicting that the Democrats will maintain control of the House. It predicts that Democrats will win between 217 and 238 seats, which translates into a loss of 19 to 40 seats. (The complete set of House […]
As election day nears, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see how accurately I could forecast election outcomes using only information derived from campaign finance records. Campaign finance records represent a rich data source that speaks to many areas of U.S. politics. Elections are no exception. I’m not the first to incorporate information […]
(Maximize the video and set the quality to 720p HD for best viewing. The video is also available for download from here.) Each senator is marked by a two-letter state code and is color coded by party membership (Democrat, Republican, Independent). The top grey bar is the distance between the mean Republican and the mean […]