Beyond Labels

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How electoral turnout and sentiment might affect the 2016 election

You can read this online here.

The fivethirtyeight.com web site, created by the brilliant Nate Silver, has a page called the “Swing-o-matic” that analyzes the voting behavior of five demographic groups: college-educated whites, non-college-educated whites, blacks, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian and other, and projects election outcomes.  You can see it (and play with it yourself) here.

We started with the results of the 2012 election and the support for each party’s candidate by the five demographic groups. We then adjusted the size of those groups based on four years of population change. When you adjust the vote and turnout above, our model recalculates the results for each state — as well as the Electoral College outcome and the national popular vote — taking into account how much of the state’s electorate the group accounts for.
You can change the sliders and see how changes in turnout and in sentiment (R versus D) would affect the electoral outcome.
As usual, Fivethirtyeight exposes all of its assumptions and methodology.
Very impressive! As always

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