For more than a decade now, we have been predicting that the changing demographic make-up of our country would change the electorate and our politics and decide elections. Last year we projected that the rising American electorate (RAE) — the rapidly growing group of unmarried women, millennials and non-white voters […] Read more »
Democrats’ Popular Vote Advantage Is Growing But That May Not Equal Election Wins
In the seven presidential elections since 1992, the Republican candidate has won the popular vote just once but has prevailed in the Electoral College three times — and the trends show that the Democrats’ edge in the popular vote may be growing. CONT. Dante Chinni, NBC News Read more »
Donald Trump’s Fragile Hold on America
… On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote lead over Trump crossed 2 million; several analysts tracking the remaining votes—which are mostly in California—believe her final advantage will near 2.5 million. Clinton will win the popular vote by more than John F. Kennedy in 1960 or Jimmy Carter in 1976, and could […] Read more »
How to recover from the polling disaster of 2016? Look beyond polls.
Planes rarely crash because one instrument fails or one gauge gives a bad reading. Rather, the right combination of things fail in tandem — a mechanical problem paired with bad weather, a backup system malfunctioning at the same time as a pilot error — leading to catastrophe. The disaster of […] Read more »
Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump
Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page. Here’s one example of the latter. I took a list of all 981 U.S. counties with 50,000 or more people and sorted it by the share of the population that had completed at least a four-year […] Read more »
The presidential election: Illness as indicator
… The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has compiled county-level data on life expectancy and the prevalence of obesity, diabetes, heavy drinking and regular physical activity (or lack thereof). Together, these variables explain 43% of Mr Trump’s gains over Mr Romney, just edging out […] Read more »