Many more graphs to study with keys at the link separating different groups. Also much more discussion of various trends.
Posted on 12/02/2014 6:35:45 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
•The 2014 election and the long-term trends •Whither the Hispanic vote? •Catholics drop out of the Democratic coalition.
Amid the tangled lines above,[below] we see the trends of America’s voters over the last 32 years.
The chart measures something very specific: How much larger (or smaller) a Democratic margin of victory has grown in each of several different voting groups for U.S. House in the last 17 elections.
For example: If Democrats won women by three points in an election Republicans won by six points, women were nine points more Democratic than the average voter in that election. And if Republicans won white women by four points while winning the election by six, then white women are two points more Democratic than the average.
Look at this trend over time, and you can see what various groups are doing while controlling for some other factors.
Before breaking out some of the key groups in their own charts, let’s discuss the rationale behind studying the electorate this way in the first place.
Why House elections? They take place once every two years, and thus provide the most consistent thermometer for the national political climate in every single election. To identify the median voter for U.S. House is to learn a lot about where the national mood is. And this thermometer is not overly affected by just one super-popular or super-unpopular candidate, the way presidential elections are, because it’s spread out among 435 individual races.
Why look at the deviation from the average voter? If you just look at margins from past elections, you’re going to lose a lot of insights among the noise — the natural ups and downs that national political circumstances produce. You just can’t get an apples-to-apples comparison when you hold up a landslide election next to a squeaker unless you adjust for those circumstances, and this method makes that adjustment for you.
If you’re trying to study one group of voters or another, the proper way to do it is to study how much more Republican are men or whites or Evangelical Christians than the average voter. Electoral performance is always relative, and this method de-emphasizes the changes of performance in any one particular election. It might be useful to know that Latino voters lean Democratic or that senior citizens lean more Republican, but it is more useful to understand how much more Democratic or Republican they are than the average voter, and whether this habit has changed over time. If it changes significantly over time, it signifies a trend that transcends the natural ups and downs suffered by the respective parties in specific election years.
Many more graphs to study with keys at the link separating different groups. Also much more discussion of various trends.
That’s a lot of lines:
Which one represents the voting trends of one-legged [heterosexual] former charter boat captains who were born east of the Mississippi?
Look how well Hillary is doing with blue-collar pedophile agnostics in the Midwest...
What a bad presentation of data.
Go to the link to see the data separated into various groups, by religion, by sex, by education, by income, by age, etc. It is most interesting. The point is that it is not nearly as bleak for the GOP as the pundits make it out to be. As the population ages and the FDR generation dies off, the electorate is becoming more conservative.
But no category for one-legged [heterosexual] former charter boat captains who were born east of the Mississippi?
Darn.
Interesting data, but must be combined with the actual growth trends for each group this to pinpoint opportunities. In other words, it’ll be more productive to target a large group that is trending more slowly than to spend resources chasing a fast-trending group comprising a shrinking number of
voters.
As far as I can tell, one of the things to keep in mind is that exit polling that breaks down groups isn’t done in every state and for all elections. Also different sets of questions are sometimes used for the states that have exit polling done. So studies like this give the impression that it is representative of the whole country while it is really only representative of those states and the places in those states that did actual exit polling and asked questions beyond ‘who did you vote for.’
Why does this matter? Because the same group can vote completely differently in different geographic regions. If enough of those regions aren’t exit polled, the end result will not be representative of actual voting trends, much less any meaningful info on presidential elections and which groups actually made impacts on the election based on state by state electoral college results.
FReegards
Could someone provide me with a link to the data? I could very quickly build some graphics that depict what happened, much more elegantly than this.
The information may be interesting but whoever prepared that chart should be fired. It’s a terrible chart.
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