When historians look back on Mitt Romney’s bid for the Presidency, one trend will be clear: no Republican candidate ever ran a similar campaign again. … Last Tuesday, Romney won three-fifths of the white vote, matching or exceeding what several winning Presidential candidates, including Reagan in 1980 and Bush in […] Read more »
A Victory for the Pollsters and the Forecasters
Now that the Florida authorities have finally confirmed that President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the Sunshine State by a margin of 50.0 per cent to 49.1 per cent, we have all the results and data we need to talk about what happened in the 2012 election, and who got […] Read more »
The Statisticians on the Bus
One of the strangest things about the final days of the 2012 presidential campaign was that the battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney became something of a sideshow, at least in the greenrooms of Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and on the Acela trains that shuttled the crème de la […] Read more »
GOP Faces Steep Climb With Young Voters
… The millennial generation — voters ages 18 to 29 — was widely expected to stay home on Election Day, deflated by partisan politics and disappointed by the president they overwhelmingly endorsed four years ago. Instead, young voters matched their participation rate from 2008, with about 50 percent of eligible […] Read more »
Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race
As Americans’ modes of communication change, the techniques that produce the most accurate polls seems to be changing as well. In last Tuesday’s presidential election, a number of polling firms that conduct their surveys online had strong results. Some telephone polls also performed well. But others, especially those that called […] Read more »
Political Racism in the Age of Obama
… Four years ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a “post-racial” era. But while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in […] Read more »