Politico has a story today on the Employee Free Choice Act, and how the numbers each side is citing aren't matching up very well:

• “Nearly three-quarters of the public — 73 percent — support the Employee Free Choice Act,” crows the AFL-CIO on its website.

• “Seventy-four percent of voters oppose the Employee Free Choice Act,” concludes research cited by the pro-business Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.

Okay, I don't know if I'm the only one here dorky enough to read Andrew Gelman and have strong feelings about Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, but I have to tell you that I'm pretty shocked to discover that Gelman's blogging at New Majority.

While I get that his work is transformational in understanding how we look at the electorate, I had hoped he was one of our guys.

DD

One of the most positive things about the rise of the blogosphere, IMHO, is the rise of what might be called "applied political science": ordinary people (as well as political professionals) applying actual data to political trends, rather than merely opining, with the goal of affecting actual elections or policies, rather than merely for the sake of knowing things.  A good example can be found at Swing State Project recently, concerning the success rate of Congressional candidates on their second try for office:

Unfortunately, there wasn't a particularly high success ratio: of the 14 races that were considered competitive where the Democratic candidate was making a second run, only three four made it over the finish line (Dan Maffei, Eric Massa, Mary Jo Kilroy, and Larry Kissell). These candidates seemed to benefit from a perfect storm of traction from a repeat run, and running against weakened opponents (a different opponent for Maffei in the wake of Jim Walsh's retirement and a bungled GOP recruitment, and befuddled, unlikable opponents for Massa and Kissell). (On the following table, * indicates a different opponent in 2008.)

The others seemed to falter, either in the face of a nutty GOPer but too red a district (Brown, Wulsin, probably Esch) or an uncontroversial 'moderate' incumbent with a strong hold on a suburban district (Seals, Burner, Feder). By contrast, because of the confluence of swing districts and craptacular opponents, NY-25, NY-29, and NC-08 seem like races we likely could have won with or without a returning opponent (although the prospect of a Maffei rematch may have caused Walsh's retirement)... which isn't to say that we should avoid rematches, simply that it may not provide as much of an advantage as conventional wisdom currently holds.

Also, I can't help but notice one troubling pattern: the male reruns improved on their 2006 numbers. The female reruns declined. If you look at the names above from the 2004-06 cycles, you see the same pattern (Nancy Boyda excepted). I won't attempt to psychoanalyze that, but it's disappointing nonetheless.

It's worth reading in full.  I would love to see some of these guys get in touch with the more academic side of the poli-sci blogosphere (e.g. The Monkey Cage or Crooked Timber)--I suspect there might be some reinvention of the wheel, and even if not I suspect there's a lot of commonality that could be profitable to both groups.

For anyone who's had to sit through too many Power Point presentations about too many data sets, this McSweeney's review will strike a familiar chord:

Upon receiving your ambiguously titled invitation, "Sales Meeting," I did not expect to witness the birth of a new mixed-media art movement. On the contrary, I suspected that it would be another narcolepsy-inducing event, for what typically passes for a presentation from the people within your division is bland, static, and with little redemptive or motivational value. It was, then, something of a shock to see your PowerPoint piece titled "Sales Forecast, Third Quarter" presented with little fanfare. The subtle downplaying of expectations only heightened the shock and amazement this tour de force eventually triggered in the minds of everyone lucky enough to view the production.

Read the whole thing.

Editor's note: Today's will be part 1 of a special two-day Building a Voter File extravaganza! Quite frankly, this topic is just too awesome to be tackled in one entry, so check back tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion.

Nate Silver had an interesting conjecture recently, in a post about how exactly Norm Coleman got his list of "improperly rejected ballots" in the never-ending Minnesota Senate race:

What I suspect Coleman did to come up with his list of 650 is something like this:

- Create a database of all ballots that were rejected for a non-matching signature ... maybe there were 1500 of these or something statewide.

- Run some algorithm to determine the likelihood of each of these 1500 ballots being a vote for Coleman as based on things like the precinct the ballot was cast in, any information Coleman has about the voter in his voter file, and perhaps even the voter's name (you can tell more than you'd think about someone based on their first and last name).

- All ballots determined by this algorithm to have a >50% likelihood of being Coleman votes were included on his list ... there turned out to be about 650 of these.

There's more beneath the fold:

It's a little outside our usual realm, but this article from the Atlantic (hat tip to Greater Greater Washington for pointing this out), really touches on a lot of the same things I've been talking about in my series on Building a Voter File:

Just a few days after Apple’s iPhone launched, a trip planner for the San Francisco Bay Area’s subway system, BART, appeared in the iTunes application store, which sells iPhone and iPod software for download. User reviews were mixed. But I was still floored. How could a local government agency move so quickly?

Turns out, it didn’t. In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data in a simple, standard, open format—a text file, basically, with a bunch of numbers separated by commas—so Google Maps could generate bus and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for any platform.

The whole article goes on to discuss some potential impacts of open APIs on government agencies and how the public could use their data.  It gives you hope, no? Read the whole thing.

I don't know why I do this, but I read a lot of Republican blogs and magazines. I managed to find this piece of beauty at Culture 11's Ladyblog.

All too often on this site, we don't get to write about the non-politicall uses of data, quantitative methods and econometrics.  After the massive success of Levitt's Freakonomics, we saw a huge increase in the popularity of using economic methods to study quirky, clever or even cutesy problems.  Even non-quant people have gotten into the act.  One of the Culture 11  Ladybloggers theorized that selection bias explains why people think that jerks are more romantically successful than non-jerks.

Oh, and you know there's more.

Via Slashdot, investigative journalist John Mecklin lays out a way that the Internet revolution is actually helping journalism (crazy, I know):

Now, in the post-Google Age, Allison sees the possibility that computer algorithms can sort through the huge amounts of databased information available on the Internet, providing public interest reporters with sets of potential story leads they otherwise might never have found. The programs could only enhance, not replace, the reporter, who would still have to cultivate the human sources and provide the context and verification needed for quality journalism. But the data-mining programs could make the reporters more efficient — and, perhaps, a less appealing target for media company bean counters looking for someone to lay off.

IMHO, the part about investigative reporters not getting laid off seems increasingly far-fetched.  There are problems in the news business that a few new reporting techniques won't solve.  But still, increasing the efficiency with which the public can gain from its own data is something worth cheering.  As I've tried to stress throughout my posts, the ability to search through massive databases of material like this is still in its infancy.  Our ability to collect information has outstripped our ability to make sense of it, and we're still growing into all the things we can do with this data.

In my last entry, I discussed matching lists when they did not share a common, persistent and unique identifier.  Basic conclusion: challenging! In this week's entry, I'll share a common technique for making the job a little easier--one which has a number of uses beyond list-matching.  Read more...

Hat tip to Secular Right.

I normally make it a point to avoid anything to do with John Derbyshire and Heather MacDonald, who are otherwise quite repellant, but even while on vacation, I can't quite seem to get away from them. A friend of mine IM'd me their reading of the Pew Study, and I thought that it might be interesting to take a look at it.  They surveyed 2,905 American adults  from July 31, 2008 to August 10, 2008.  Anyone self-identifying as atheist, agnostic or unaffiliated with any religion were left out of the poll. The previous waves of the study were in 2002 and 2007.

There's more...