2020 Post-Mortem (Part One): Portrait of a Persuadable Latino

Equis has been conducting a post-mortem of the Latino vote in the 2020 election, specifically geared toward (a) documenting where Trump and the GOP made gains with Latino voters (and where they didn’t), and (b) trying to explain that movement. Today we are releasing Part One of the post-mortem, focused […] Read more »

Demographics and Expectations: Analyzing Biden and Trump’s Performances

Key Points• The predictive power of demographics makes county margins strongly correlated and thus inferable from each other. Comparing the actual results to the expected results based on county demographics gives us a better idea of candidate performance.• In the 2020 presidential election, Democrats overperformed in states with high numbers […] Read more »

Most Americans Agree on Four Foundations of Democracy, but Execution of Those Ideals Receives Failing Grades

While Americans have high ideals for what makes up our democracy, a new Grinnell College National Poll shows our country gets failing grades when it comes to executing those ideals in real life. The poll, a partnership between Grinnell College and J. Ann Selzer of Selzer & Company, was released […] Read more »

Survey of the Performance of American Elections

The Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE) is the only public opinion project in the country that is dedicated explicitly to understanding how voters themselves experience the election process. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive, nationwide dataset at the state level documenting election issues as experienced by […] Read more »

Do You Think You Can Tell How a Neighborhood Voted Just by Looking Around?

An interactive, street-level quiz on America’s full political landscape Most readers who have played so far are pretty good at this game, at least in certain kinds of places. The precincts that voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump or just as heavily for Joe Biden were generally the easiest for […] Read more »

First Takes on the Election #2: What About the Polls?

… Putting the major polls together, their miss in last year’s presidential election was, on average, 4 percentage points, mainly because they underestimated the Trump vote; they also underestimated the Republican down-ballot votes by about the same margin. (Fivethirtyeight.com’s final averages of polls gave Biden an 8.4-point lead; he ended […] Read more »