Articles by jjh

Mapping the Iowa GOP 2012 Caucus Results

January 4, 2012 | jjh

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...]

Donor analysis in R – Smith for Congress

June 13, 2011 | jjh

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...]

Visualizing US House Results with a Seats-Votes curve

November 16, 2010 | jjh

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...]

House Data: 41k finance summaries from 2200 candidates

July 13, 2010 | jjh

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 with R

May 26, 2010 | jjh

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...]

New FECHell 0.1.9

March 22, 2010 | jjh

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...]

Re-mapping Massachusetts Special election results

January 27, 2010 | jjh

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...]

Mapping MA election results

January 25, 2010 | jjh

The Swing State Project recently had some very interesting maps comparing last week’s election results from Massachusetts to 2008 presidential primary results. Their maps posted show some very interesting trends, but the maps themselves are lacking in information and the color schemes are pretty ugly. Using my own source data ...
[Read more...]

Aggreate electoral targeting with R

October 22, 2009 | jjh

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...]

open-source campaign finance analysis with R and MySQL

June 18, 2009 | jjh

Introduction In Part 1 of this tutorial we introduced the fechell library by extracting all itemized contributions from individuals made to the Obama For America campaign in 2007 and 2008. In Part 2 of the tutorial we will summarize that data set by importing it into a MySQL database and aggregating contributions by week ...
[Read more...]

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)