2014 Florida Governors Race Results by DMA

by Alex Patton | Apr 18, 2017 | Political Research

Thinking about 2018 with a potential matchup of Rick Scott v Senator Bill Nelson, I was messing around with scripts to combine data sets and came up with vote totals for the 2014 campaign for Florida Governor featuring Rick Scott v Charlie Crist by Florida DMA (Television Markets).

Here you go…..I may write later on what this possibly means for 2018, but for now, it is provided as is for your enjoyment.

How divided is Florida?

by Alex Patton | Apr 1, 2017 | Political Research

I went to bed last night thinking about about DecisionDeskHQ’s attempt to make a nationwide precinct map.  It is a challenging and cool project.

Thinking about this as I slumbered, I awoke wondering just ‘how divided are we in Florida at the precinct level’?  

Thanks to the great state of Florida, we have precinct level results, and over morning coffee, I found my answer.

The answer:  Pretty damn divided.  

If you consider a precinct “competitive” if separated by 10% or less, then few Floridians live in precincts that are competitive – the median difference in the 2016 POTUS election is 28% in Florida.    

Only 18% of Florida’s precincts had Clinton and Trump within 10% of each other.

OR

Almost half (46%) of Florida’s precincts resulted in the difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton being greater than or equal to 30%.

P.S.  The data is below, and now you know what nerds do on Saturday mornings before their kids wake up.

DATA

This is a histogram of the absolute value of the difference between the Clinton% and Trump% of the vote total.

Note:  (I dropped the random precincts that are less than .01 and greater than .99)

Here are the summary statistics:

Precinct by category

Sum of Votes cast by Precinct Category

You can download my cleaned data at: gitHub or at data.world.

TV DMAs by County

by Alex Patton | Feb 11, 2017 | Political Research

I was looking for a data-set this morning for a GIS project, and I thought the data would be relatively easy to find.  It wasn’t.

I did find what I wanted in one case, but someone was charging $199 for the data.

So, I spent a couple of hours researching, compiling and cleaning data.

I offer it to you for free and in the name of political analysis.  Enjoy!

Data Set: TV DMAs by Counties – USA.

Why don’t third parties win US presidential elections?

by Alex Patton | Jun 1, 2016 | Political Research

As always, some of the best questions come from readers of the blog.  “Why don’t third parties win US presidential elections?” came to us via email.

It is also timely with the recent discussion from Kristol and polling information from Data Targeting.

Polling Third Parties

In a traditional poll, pollsters may ask a question like, “Would you consider supporting a third party candidate? Yes or No?”  Traditionally, because the question is asked like this, support for third parties is overstated, and the question has proven to be a poor predictor of voting behavior.

Another way to ask the question is in a horse race question like, “If the election were held today, who would vote for?”  Because the answer has no ramifications, again support for third parties is overstated in polling.

So, if people tell pollster they support the idea of an independent candidate then why don’t they actually vote for them?  Why do most people vote for their party’s nominee?

History of Third Parties in the US

Source: http://www.thisnation.com/question/042.html

Research

The authoritative scholar on the issue is Steven Rosenstone at the University of Minnesota.

While there are structural barriers in place for third parties: ballot access, campaign finance laws, polarization of the party elites preventing cross-over third party validators, sparse media coverage, debate exclusion, and the lack of belief that a third party can win, there is a more fundamental way to look at this:  the psychology of the voter.

Our political system is dominated by the two party system.  Voters operate in primarily in this two party system and many voters take short cuts or cues provided by the parties to simplify their decision making.  To step outside the two party system takes considerable effort.

Rosenstone developed a “Four Part Test for Third Party Support” and I believe it provides a framework to answer the question.

On average, for a voter to consider voting for the third party candidate, they have to reject 4 things.  Not 2 of 4, but rather all 4.  They have to reject both parties’ candidates and both parties, then and only then will they consider a third party.   Then the voter has to find a third party candidate they consider to be legitimate and finally, vote for them.  A tall task.

Additional Polling

We can see Rosenstone’s framework at work in a CNN poll in May 2016.  When respondents were asked if their support for a candidate was an vote of support of opposition, we observe the following:  (editor note: quite a sad commentary on our current choices.)

Conclusion

In part, this explains why Donald Trumps’ numbers have improved in the past 4 weeks.  His support is growing from Republicans who rejected his primary campaign, but are “coming home” to support the party and/or reject Hillary Clinton/democratic nominee.

In part, this also explains, in part HRC’s soft numbers.  The Democrats are still split between HRC and Sanders and have yet to coalesce around a candidate.  We should expect the Democratic nominee’s numbers to improve after the voters move through Rosenstone’s framework.

As you can see, third parties have a difficult road ahead of them and the most likely path is not to win, but rather to prevent someone else from winning or the “spoiler” role.

PS – You may be interested in a newer post on this topic: So, You Want to Run As an Independent or Third-Party Candidate?