Why Blue States Are the Real ‘Tea Party’

When the modern Tea Party movement coalesced in the early days of the Obama presidency, its allusion to the political grievances of the protesters in Boston Harbor a couple of hundred years earlier seemed plausible enough: Its members felt that their taxes were too high and their interests not adequately […] Read more »

Donald Trump did not win 34% of Latino vote in Texas. He won much less.

Ever since the national exit poll reported that 29 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump, the accuracy of that number has been debated. In particular, some have questioned whether it is an overestimate, citing a separate survey of Latino voters by the polling firm Latino Decisions that reported that 18 […] Read more »

Survey weighting and that 2% swing

Nate Silver agrees with me that much of that shocking 2% swing can be explained by systematic differences between sample and population: survey respondents included too many Clinton supporters, even after corrections from existing survey adjustments. In Nate’s words, “Pollsters Probably Didn’t Talk To Enough White Voters Without College Degrees.” […] Read more »

Algorithmic Bias: How the Clinton Campaign May Have Lost the Presidency or Why You Should Care

We’ve recently been informed that the Clinton campaign relied heavily on an automated decision aid to inform senior campaign leaders about likely scenarios in the election. This algorithm—known as “Ada”—was a key component, if not “the” component in how senior staffers formulated campaigning strategy. … So what happened with Clinton’s […] Read more »