Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Who Will Win the Election?

I'm working on a longish paper to possibly be presented in a few months on my new favorite topic -- surprised losers in elections. These are folks who expected their candidate to win an election, but who actually lost, and  the consequences of being surprised by the outcome.  In preparation, I'm looking at presidential elections from 1952 to 2012 and who people predicted would win the election.

Below, a sneak peek. The blue bars represent respondents who favored a Democratic candidate who also predicted that candidate would win. The red bars do the same for those who preferred the Republican candidate who predicted that candidate would win. As you'd expect, in runaway elections the gap is wide (look at 1972, for example). In closer elections, both expect their preferred candidate to be victorious (2000 being a good case study). I've got a lot more to do with this rather large data set, but this gives you a hint of where I'm going.  Plus I have to go back and validate the data some more to ensure nothing weird is going on, but just eyeballing it -- all looks okay.




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