Seth Masket

I have not yet read Sasha Issenberg’s book (it’s on my holiday wish list!), although I imagine there are still several books to be written about the use of social networking software by the presidential campaigns this year. This subject came up quite a bit at last week’s post-election panel here at the University of […]

Nate Silver helpfully compiles voter turnout figures (so far) by state in last week’s presidential election. I’ve used those figures to chart the change in turnout since 2008, plotted against the state’s partisan vote in the election: Turnout was down in most states since 2008, but the one area where we saw slight increases in […]

Nancy Pelosi, describing the incoming Democratic House caucus, of which white males make up a minority: [O]ur House Democratic Caucus [will be] the first caucus in the history of civilized government to have a majority of women and minorities. The only way this statement is true is if we define “civilized” as meaning “American.” This […]

Economic growth and the vote for president, based on the most recent numbers: So, after all that money was spent, all those ads were run, all those voters were contacted by all those field offices, we get… an election outcome that you could have predicted back in July or earlier. So was this all a […]

A political observer could be forgiven for not noticing that there are more than 6,000 state legislative elections occurring tomorrow — the presidential race tends to suck up most of the available oxygen. But these elections will occur nonetheless, and they may profoundly affect public policy where you live. (For example, but for one state […]

In the latest effort by pundits to grab Nate Silver’s hands and hit him in the face with them while asking “Why are you hitting yourself?”, we see Michael Gerson’s column that begins with a dismissal of Silver and morphs into an attack on political science. There are a few points in here on which […]

Frida Ghitis writes an odd column for CNN urging voters not to take Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath into consideration when casting a vote in the presidential election. As evidence for why such voting is wrongheaded, she offers examples of national leaders in Thailand, Japan, Peru, and Chile attracting a great deal of support during […]

Why did the Republicans decide to make the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” a central theme to their national convention this year? Isn’t this a bit odd, since the economy was in free-fall four years ago, and clearly isn’t today? That may be true, but the voters aren’t […]

Two months ago, I noted the striking differences in the numbers of field offices the presidential campaigns have established in the swing states. I figured I’d check up on those numbers as we go into the home stretch of the election. Here’s what the field office totals look like now: The differences are still pretty […]

Not surprisingly, they vote when the polls first open and shortly before they close. From a study of voting patterns in three California counties by Douglas Spencer and Zachary Markovitz: This paper details the design and implementation of an Election Day field study targeting the operation of polling stations. This pilot study represents the first […]