Data Sources

At AEI, Karlyn Bowman and Samantha Goldstein have a report titled "The exit polls: A history and trends over time, 1972–2020."

Key Points

• Since the 1970s when they were first used nationally, exit polls have been an invaluable tool to understand voters’ views.
• In this report, we examine how more than 50 different groups of voters have voted in the past 13 presidential elections. To name a few groups, we look at men and women, married and not married voters, voters across various regions, and voters by age, race and ethnicity, religion, and partisan and ideological affiliation. 
• This AEI Public Opinion Study is a unique historical compilation and includes an interview with Joe Lenski, Edison Research’s cofounder and executive vice president, who discusses the challenges COVID-19 posed to the exit poll and the future of the consortium going forward.

 Read the PDF.

 

Updated: U.S. House Special Elections, 1957-Presenthttps://t.co/q5mmq1eQyO

— Greg Giroux (@greggiroux) January 12, 2022

From Decision Desk HQ:

• The folks at Daily Kos Elections have begun releasing their tables showing how much of the population of newly-drawn congressional districts comes from existing districts. As an example, they show the results of the redistricting process in Oregon, which added a sixth district.
• The trouble I have in picking a political email of the week is that there are so many to choose from. So this might sound like a cop-out, but this week I’m letting you choose. This is very much a work in progress, but here’s a searchable database of the political emails that I’ve been getting over the past few years, more than 103,000 so far

The Stupid Party

There are many, many fake Lincoln quotations on social media.    RNC tweets one (still up after five hours of flaming):

Valerie Strauss reports at The Washington Post:

It’s not just the White House that seems to have a problem with spelling. Someone at the U.S. Education Department, now led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, does, too.

At 8:45 on Sunday morning, the department’s official Twitter account misspelled the name of W.E.B. Du Bois, a black sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and co-founder of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. Du Bois was misspelled as DeBois — an error that might be understandable from a young student, but the U.S. Education Department?

Hours after the tweet was posted — and after the error was lampooned by a number of people on Twitter, it was corrected, with an apology:

Post updated – our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo. — US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017




The department fixed that tweet quickly, changing “apologizes” for “apologies.”

Oppo & Coordination

CQ-Roll Call has a smart article on oppo. Dems are looking at divorce records and lawsuits of challengers and open-seat candidates. Reps are looking and votes & quotes of incumbents. The article highlights a loophole in campaign finance law:

In general, there are no specific rules about how research can be shared between the committees and candidates. Once the independent expenditure arms of the committees are established, the two sides of the wall are prohibited from coordinating with each other. But when it comes to research, both parties appear to have found a way to communicate without coordinating.

Since sharing public information isn’t considered coordination, all four Senate and House campaign committees appear to be utilizing a network of public websites to communicate messages by highlighting opposition research.

In some cases, the sites look like boilerplate pages available through the committees’ main pages, including the “Meet the Republicans” section of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s website. Clicking on a race through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s 2010 races map takes you to a paragraph and three bullet points about the race.

House Republicans appear to be using micro sites that include a Democratic incumbent’s name. For example nyefacts.org is used for information about Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.). The National Republican Senatorial Committee has a series of sites that can be found by inserting a state as a subdomain — for example kentucky.nrsc.org.

The websites seem innocuous but are actively read by party strategists on both sides of the aisle. Staffers in each committee are assigned to combing the sites each morning.

“There is nothing illegal about it,” according to one GOP insider. “Both sides are doing it.”

See:

• reid.nrsc.org
• boxer.nrsc.org
• florida.nrsc.org
• connecticut.nrsc.org
• wisconsin.nrsc.org