John Sides

HuffPo’s Jason Linkins asks: Dunno if @monkeycageblog takes requests, but I’d love to see some poli sci on when, on the campaign timeline, tv ads are most effective. Here’s what we know, though admittedly we need to learn a lot more.  I’m cribbing from my old “Moneyball” post on 538. The short story is that […]

In a recent piece, I modeled the choices of decided voters and then looked to see what that model would predict about the remaining undecided voters.  The apparent answer was that these voters will break pretty evenly for Obama and Romney. My co-author Lynn Vavreck suggested a different approach.  In our data for The Gamble, […]

How trustworthy are this year’s presidential polls?  On Monday, November 5, will they be able to tell us who is likely to win the election?  We’ll know soon enough, but in the meantime the historical record provides some important context.  This record suggests three things: 1) The polls have been fairly accurate.  (Adverbs are always […]

Jay Cost took a look at how Gallup’s final likely voter poll was associated with the Electoral College vote share.  Here’s the picture: The advantage of using Gallup is it goes back so far in time.  Out of curiosity, I then asked Cost what the prediction would be given Gallup’s current number, which gives the […]

I’ll speak to three possibilities, just for starters: 1) Sandy hurts Obama.  As Larry Bartels wrote about a few months ago, incumbent presidents can be punished for natural disasters, including floods.  Of course, a lot hinges on whether serious damage hits the key battleground states in Sandy’s path: Virginia and Pennsylvania, plus probably New Hampshire […]

This question obviously has important implications for who wins this election. We can start by dismissing the blanket statement that “undecideds break for the challenger.”  [NB: That phrase was garbled in the original version of this post.] That is not true as a blanket statement.  See Daron Shaw’s chapter on swing votes in Unconventional Wisdom […]

From Open Secrets: Hat tip to Tobin Grant. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

This is a guest post by political scientists Brian Crisher and Mark Souva. ***** In the last debate, Governor Romney made the claim that the US Navy is the smallest it’s been since 1916 implying that the US Navy is regressing in terms of overall strength. How accurate is this claim? We recently compiled a […]

The lesson of this debate over Romney’s momentum—see James Fallows—is this: reporters have to ground their stories in data.  It’s fine to quote from campaign officials and gauge their mood.  But rather than use this to conjure up a narrative that implies SOMETHING NEW IS HAPPENING HERE!, reporters can be the watchdogs they typically want […]

Aaron Blake: The once-in-a-decade redistricting process has taken the nation’s already-polarized congressional map and — you guessed it! — made it even more polarized, says a new study from the nonpartisan election reform group Fair Vote… …The result is that the blue districts will, almost without fail, elect liberal Democrats, while the red districts will, almost […]