Posts filed under 'Politics'
I’d anticipated making this post within days of the election, but while the winner was known as soon as they called California, the result in Missouri has only been called in the last couple of days following a tight recount. In the end the state went to John McCain, a blow to the pride of the former “bellwether state” which has gone to the winner in every Presidential election in the last century except this one and 1956. So we are now ready to present the final chart for the 2008 US Presidential elections, including scattergrams that show how this year compares to 2004, and how the final results compare to the final projections from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com that we used through the night. Incidentally, Silver accurately predicted the winner in every state but one, Indiana, which went to Obama by less than a 1% margin.
This was useful on election night, but it was a lot less useful than I had hoped, because what I didn’t take into account is that states are “called” for one side or another long before any estimates of the final voting percentages are available. Next time around I shall re-design it to take that into account. For now, time to get busy on something to watch during the next UK general election!
November 20th, 2008
Paul Crowley
I find the maps and charts that the TV networks provide nearly useless for understanding the state of play during an election night, so I’ve taken to designing my own diagrams. For tomorrow’s Presidential elections, I’ve turned the projections on fivethirtyeight.com into a graph which illustrates the likely outcome of the election and the paths to victory for the two candidates:
Today’s predictions
The x-axis represents the projected margin of victory - leftwards for Obama, rightwards for McCain. The y-axis represents electoral votes. The states are ordered by margin of victory.
From this graph you can immediately see that Obama is projected to take all the Kerry states by a margin of 6.9% or more, and the Bush states Iowa and New Mexico appear to be firmly in his pocket with projected margins of 11.0% and 8.6%. That puts him 5 EVs from the middle line - a draw - and thus 6 EVs from victory. So if Obama wins all of these states plus any other state with 6 EVs or more - or any two other states - he wins the election.
That’s useful for now, but what about during election night itself? You can see a chart that says something like Kerry is 10 EVs ahead of Bush, but that doesn’t help clarify which of them is really doing better - if they’ve called New York a whole load of New England states while a lot of Southern states are still waiting to announce, then the Democratic lead might be no more than you would expect, or it might even be less.
Here’s a fantasy scenario what I have lined up for the Presidential elections tomorrow. When they call states, I’ll move them to the top or bottom of the graph as appropriate. The area inbetween the called states is the remaining battleground - and anyone who can win all the states up to and across the finish line can win the election.
I will also be maintaining a scattergram showing how the projections have done against reality, and a cartogram illustrating the electoral college.
This is tricky information to represent in a single graph, so any ideas for improvements will be gratefully received - thanks!
November 3rd, 2008
Paul Crowley
In my last post about this I observed an S-shape in the results of the polling data, and speculated that it might show psychological bias on the part of the Intraders. I’m not so sure now. This graph shows all polls in the last 30 days; recent polls are dark colours and older ones lighter, and the S-shape is much less visible. So it may simply be an artifact of the way we aggregate polling data to generate a single figure.
June 23rd, 2008
Paul Crowley
Continue Reading June 20th, 2008
Paul Crowley
Clinton will probably drop out of the race in the next few days, so let’s give the diagram showing both of them one last airing. This looks at a month’s worth of polling data to give a picture of how their relative chance of victory has changed over time - it’s an animated GIF, so you’ll need to have GIF animation enabled in your browser.
She’s moved from being a percentage point below Obama to two percentage points ahead of him. What changed so much over the course of May? My guess is simply that people who aren’t natural Democratic voters are more likely to feel warmth to Clinton the further the nomination gets from her grasp, and we’d be seeing the exact opposite picture if it were Clinton who was expecting the concession call any day now.
Update: more commentary on this curious shift that seems to make a similar point.
June 3rd, 2008
Paul Crowley
Continue Reading May 30th, 2008
Paul Crowley
Continue Reading May 12th, 2008
Paul Crowley
Continue Reading May 8th, 2008
Paul Crowley
Continue Reading December 30th, 2007
Paul Crowley
I wrote a short script to display the results of the 2004 US presidential elections as a bar chart, shown below (click for full-size image, which will make more sense):
The width of each state indicates the number of electoral college votes it has; the height the extent to which votes for one party exceeded votes for the other. The script is in Python and uses Cairo for drawing. The most challenging part of writing the script was…
Continue Reading January 11th, 2007
Paul Crowley
