Analysis of tonight’s election results (and why I don’t need to do it anymore)

Back in the day, I would do a post-election post, summarizing information from the election outcomes and exit polls. For example, after the 2008 election:

As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor: The gap between young and old has increased—a lot: But there was no massive turnout among young voters. According to the exit polls, 18% of the voters this time were under 30, as compared to 17% of voters in 2004. (By comparison, 22% of voting-age Americans are under 30.) The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing. See this state-by-state scatterplot of Obama vote in 2008 vs. Kerry vote in 2004: The standard deviation of the state swings (excluding D.C. and the unusual case of Hawaii) was 3.3%. That is, after accounting for the national swing in Obama’s favor, most of the states were within 3% of where they were, compared to their relative positions in 2004. By comparison, here’s the 2000/2004 graph: The standard deviation of these state swings was 2.4%. This was even less variation–2004 was basically a replay of 2000—still, the relative state swings of 3.3% in 2008 were not large by historical standards. Again, Obama didn’t redraw the map; he shifted the map over in his favor. (Or, to put it more precisely, the economy shifted the map over in the Democrats’ favor and Obama took advantage of this.) Here’s the map showing where Obama and McCain did better or worse than expected based on 2004: Finally, how did the pre-election polls do? Here’s the scatterplot: I see some systematic patterns: Obama underperformed where the polls had him way down, and he outperformed where the polls had him up.

But I don’t need to do this sort of thing anymore.

Why not? Because the news media do it well all by themselves now. The New York Times page is good, also freelance sites by analysts such as former Fivethirtyeight.com honchos Nate Silver and Elliott Morris. There’s been an impressive improvement in political analysis in the past 25 years.

Back in the day, the election-night and post-election summaries in the news media were frustratingly crude. As the votes came in, the TV networks would just report raw totals based on X% of the vote in state Y, without even trying to do any analytics, even anything as simple as tallying the swing from those precincts compared to the previous election. And then the next day you just get a list of the winners along with some exit poll results.

What’s changed?

First, exit polling has become more difficult—all those mail-in votes—so there’s more of a focus on the actual election results. Second, outsiders such as Nate have upped the game, leading other news organizations to follow. Third, data processing is better so that now sites can immediately make this sort of display:

Things didn’t use to be this way. Back in 2000, I was in a meeting with the news media exit poll consortium and I was trying to persuade them to look at swings and to do MRP to help with their noisy data . . . and they didn’t listen to me. They were a happy monopoly and didn’t need no fancy analytics. But look at the news media now. I have the impression that campaigns are much more sophisticated in their analyses too.

I’d like to say that the media and political campaigns have caught up with academic political science. But it would be more accurate to say that they’ve surpassed us. I still think academic political science has useful things to contribute: new methods such as MRPW, innovative data collection and presentation from CES and others, and also we have the space to try to systematically understand trends such as trickle-down polarization. As well as all sorts of work out there that I haven’t even heard of. But these analyses I used to do, looking at swings, going back and forth between the local story and the big picture? The news media can do it better. I guess that’s how Bill James must feel when he sees modern sports analytics: he has his insights, but the stuff he did that was difficult and innovative back in the 1980s is now out there, and at a much more sophisticated level.

P.S. I’m hoping in a few months to get a detailed report from Yair and his team, reporting not just what happened in the vote but what was going on underneath. Kind of like their reports from 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024. Each of these came out in the May following the election, so stay tuned.