Random thing I've been wondering about lately: based on past elections, should we care about how Independents break? (Are their voting patterns a good indicator of who wins overall?) ANES doesn't always give too large samples of Ind.'s who voted, but overall trend points to yes.
Correlation between two-party Democratic president vote shares among pure Independents (from ANES surveys) and among all Americans (election returns) is 0.87.
Same strong correlation holds for Electoral College vote share too.
2020 seems like it might fit well with this pattern given strong Biden leads among Independents in recent polls (YouGov +11, CNN +22, Morning Consult +13, NY Times +9) and overall strength in the election. (Compare that to 2016 where Clinton lost among Independents.)
One other thing -- relationships are also strong for other partisan subgroups, but it's strongest among Independents. For example for Electoral College vote shares, correlation is 0.90 among Independents, but 0.77 among Democrats and 0.71 among Republicans.
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There's been a lot of informative work on subgroup voting patterns in 2020. One thing I wonder about: how consistent is the story across surveys? I've been digging into crosstabs to get a sense of within-pollster, 2016-20 changes across 8 pollsters. Threading some results here...
A few things:
-why looking within pollster is key dataforprogress.org/blog/5/02/bide…
-crosstab data is here docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
-there's a lot of variation in how pollsters report crosstabs
-graphs show diff in Biden's subgroup margin - Clinton's (& legend shows poll's overall shift)
First by gender--movement generally in Dem direction, but shifts among women are much greater. Net gender gap increases are 11, 9, 3, 2, 9, 7, -8, 14.
New from me @UpshotNYT: survey experiment I conducted gauging voter reactions to greater leftist rhetoric + policies coming from Dem candidates this primary season. Progressive turn solidifies Dem support, but there's backlash among Independents. Thread: nytimes.com/2019/09/30/ups…
A dominant theme of the first few Democratic debates was the leftward turn taken by candidates on a national stage, and what were the possible implications of this embrace of various progressive policies -- see some example headlines here:
Political science research (andrewbenjaminhall.com/Hall_APSR.pdf, nyu.edu/projects/polit…) suggests such extremism would be punished by voters, and that's informed speculation on reactions to current Dem rhetoric. But we still lack good contemporary evidence on how reactions play out.