Introduction On Tuesday January 3rd 2012 the Iowa Republican party held it’s presidential caucuses, with Mitt Romney beating Rick Santorum by 8 votes as of noon on Jan 4th. This was an exciting race with multiple lead changes and entrance polling showing many late undecideds and large gaps in candidate support ... [Read more...]

We perform a voter file analysis for Wake County, NC using R. [Read more...]

In a previous post I introduced the Smith for Congress data set. The data is 49k contributions made by individuals to a congressional campaign for the 2006-2010 electoral cycles. Smith for Congress is not the name of the actual campaign. Individual contributions are not required to be disclosed by a ... [Read more...]

Visualize location logs created by the iPhone using R and Google Maps. [Read more...]

I perform a precincts-votes analysis on the returns from the Chicago Democratic Mayoral primary of 2011. [Read more...]

Mapping the Chicago Democratic Mayoral 2011 primary with Ruby, R, and ggplot2 [Read more...]

A few weeks ago I wrote about ways to compare major-party returns in US House elections. I experimented with several visualizations, none as useful as the seats-votes curve. A traditional seats-votes cure measures average party performance against individual US House results. Our simplified curve uses a density plot to measure ... [Read more...]

The latest Offensive Politics Housedata file has been released. This file covers 51,463 individual electronic FEC filings for US House committees from 2001 to 10/18/2010. [Read more...]

New Housedata release of 49,914 summary filings from 7897 candidates for the US House 2002-2010. [Read more...]

The Democratic major-party vote share of US House elections 2002-2008 visualized 5 different ways. [Read more...]

I’d like to announce a new project by Offensive Politics called House Data, launching today. House Data is a large-scale extract of FEC Form 3 Summary of receipts of disbursements (pdf warning) of every US House campaign from mid-2001 onward. The traditional source for campaign finance summaries is the Candidate ... [Read more...]

Voter targeting for turnout is the process of scoring registered voters using demographic and electoral variables taken from voter lists and commercial databases. The score of all voters together is used to predict overall turnout, which determines the allocation of campaign resources and directs strategy for voter contact and communication. ... [Read more...]

Our FEC report file library FECHell has been updated to 0.1.9. The release includes a half dozen bug fixes and the following new features: Speed improvements – Schedule and field names names are matched by compiled regular expressions instead of brute-force string matching, resulting in a ~25% speed increase for large files. DEF ... [Read more...]

I had previously posted maps showing the difference in major party vote share between the 2008 Presidential election and the 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts. Colleagues and readers of the Revolutions blog had some very insightful criticisms of these maps, in particular that the color scale was over-stating the swing in ... [Read more...]

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Aggregate electoral targeting is the process of determining the likely hood of a citizen choosing to vote turnout), and which candidate that person is most likely to vote for (partisan bias) in a given race using historical turnout and partisan bias. The output from this targeting allows a campaign to ... [Read more...]

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