Election Night Recap, NJ and NY23
Charles Franklin | November 4, 2009
I'm headed to bed but here are a couple of snapshots of election night.
First, above, New Jersey then and now. Whatever else you say about the race, Corzine lost support across all regions of the state and by relatively constant amounts. This "uniform swing" shows that he didn't just lose in Rep areas, or Dem areas, or urban centers. The decline in Corzine support was very widespread and quite even. An across the board loss.
In NY23, Hoffman generally outperformed McCain's vote in 2008, but not by enough to take the race. These are based on 87% of precincts reporting, so not quite final data.
Finally, the dynamics of both NJ and NY23 were pretty stable. Despite differences in reporting times from various counties, the margins held pretty constant through the evening.
Since today wasn't exciting enough, President Obama will be in Madison tomorrow, so my day will be pretty well taken up with teaching in the morning and news coverage the rest of the day. I'll leave it to Mark and colleagues to provide the wisdom tomorrow. Happy Election Day Post.
By Charles Franklin | November 4, 2009 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
Comments
Umm, Charles, where is the rest of New Jersey? It looks like you left out the two most Democratic counties (Essex and Hudson), maybe to save space. That might be worth a comment.
In fairness to last night's liveblog commenter "jazz," I ought to say that it's a bit misleading to say that Corzine lost support "by relatively constant amounts" across the state, unless we know the standard of comparison. The changes in the counties at upper right look to be on the order of 8 percentage points; the changes in Ocean and Monmouth are more like 12 points. That's not a big difference in "standard errors," but it's pretty big in votes, especially because (1) Christie picks up share as Corzine loses it and (2) turnout in Ocean and Monmouth was indeed strong.
Whether it's more useful to accentuate the overall trend or the variations depends on one's purpose. I don't think one could say that Corzine lost because of a few Republican counties, but one can certainly say that Christie was very successful there.
Posted on November 4, 2009 11:49 AM
I think this answers which type of polling was better at least in NJ. Looks like IVR was the better method.
-Polaris
Posted on November 4, 2009 12:54 PM
Mark--
Thanks for catching this. My bad. I've fixed the chart. The data were there but the first version was run before Essex and Hudson reported. I failed to change the range of the axes late last night after they reported so the figure cropped them out. That's now fixed.
Also I confess my characterization of uniform swing is a bit too gross. The equation for 2009 votes as a function of 2005 vote is
Dem09 = -14..42 + 1.12*Dem05
R^2 =.96, se=2.3
So the big story is the drop of 14.4 points across the board, but the high dem counties dropped less and the high rep counties dropped more. Not dramatically more, but statistically significant.
Charles
Posted on November 4, 2009 10:03 PM
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