Tag: 2012 Election

  • Show Me Some Swing

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Problems with my access to the tubes of the internets prevented me from posting this piece last week. But it’s still good and still relevant, especially in the wake of last night’s presidential debate. The New York Times and the FiveThirtyEight forecast came together to create this interactive flow chart, if you will, of the…

  • Absentee Ballots

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    This graphic comes from a set by the New York Times that looks at absentee and mail-in ballots, which are particularly popular in western states. The representation of the absentee ballot from Minnesota in 2008 is then examined to see which areas were the reasons for discounted ballots. Follow the directions to the best of…

  • The Drop in the Unemployment Rate and How to Spin It

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    On Friday we received the monthly jobs report. And the furore that arose with it. Principally the anger stemmed from right-leaning commentators who believed that the non-partisan Bureau of Labor Statistics, a government agency tasked with collecting data on employment among other metrics, “cooked the books”/ “massaged the figures”/ flat-out lied to show a significant drop…

  • I Gesture Unto Thee…

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    We are in the home stretch of the presidential campaign and the first of the four debates (three presidential, one vice-presidential) is tonight in Denver, Colorado. Unfortunately debates tend to be less about ideas and more about talking points, gotchas, and zingers. Regardless of the debates’ utility, candidates do not always convey everything they express…

  • The Hispanic Vote

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    People make a great deal about the Hispanic vote and how it will affect the election. In every election I can recall. Granted, that’s only  a few presidential elections and a couple more Congressional mid-terms. But the problem is that Hispanics do not vote. In scientific-ish terms, the Hispanic vote is wasted potential energy—they could…

  • The 47%

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    This is the year of the percentages. From 99 to 47. Earlier this week, Mother Jones revealed via a secretly recorded dinner Mitt Romney as claiming that he doesn’t care about the 47% of people who do not pay income tax. He probably meant that he doesn’t care about getting their vote rather than caring…

  • Revising the Jobs Reports

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Last Friday was the jobs report for the month of August. And it was not as high as economists had expected. The problem is that the initial report is often inaccurate despite the fact we make such a big deal about the report. So the Washington Post looked at the revisions that take place in…

  • How Has the Democratic Party Changed

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    This past weekend the Washington Post published an infographic looking at how the Democratic Party has demographically changed over time and compared those changes to those in the Republican Party. The piece is large, but shows some interesting trends particularly with the racial diversification of the political parties—or lack thereof. It is an important trend…

  • Ethnic Comparison of Romney and Obama Voters

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    A rare mid-day posting. Some interesting figures published on Twitter by Public Policy Polling look at the ethnic breakdown of the—I presume self-identified—voters for both Governor Romney and President Obama. Perhaps we all already knew this, but one voter group is more diverse than the other. To see whether these align with the national population,…

  • Olympic Medal Ranking

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    As I wrote about last weekend, one can look at the Olympics rankings in a number of different ways. Even without weighting medal counts, one has to decide whether to rank countries by gold medals (as the IOC does) or by total medals (my personal preference). The New York Times looks at both in an…