This morning, @TheEconomist launches a polling model for the upcoming French presidential election. Polls there are pretty good, and Macron has a good chance of winning.
We have tried some new (and some old) things in communicating uncertainty to readers: economist.com/France2022
You can read an explanation of our methods (and see some cool additional charts) here:
To put a number on things, we give Macron a 79-in-100 chance of winning re-election (conditional on announcing he’s running, which we’re expecting to happen in the coming days).
That’s a bit higher than the chance we would have given Hillary Clinton on Nov 8, 2016, sooo…
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Am hearing more and more that Dems have gerrymandered their way to a balanced national House map. Will have more on this next week, but 2 points are (a) this ignores the role of litigation + independent commissions & (b) that there is still huge asymmetric bias at the state level
As a reference pt, states that Biden won by more than 5pts in 2020 had an efficiency gap of 5% under the old lines. Republicans rates had an average efficiency gap closer to 15 (2x the proposed threshold for litigation). After redistricting, Ds might be closer to 9, and Rs 14-15.
(Note, of course, that lots of maps aren't finalized yet so these calculations require some educated guesses, and numbers will change slightly)
The data are president-day pairs, so actually quite large from a raw n perspective -- the problem is that we have a limited data set to capture changing voter psychology (we have ~2.5 presidential terms of high partisanship)
the biden supporter version of january 6 is nancy pelosi kneeling while the cast of hamilton, sitting on the barrier of the gallery, yell-sings “history has its eyes on you” at kevin mccarthy
Here is my piece on our YouGov/Economist data showing a huge dropoff in support for Biden among young people. The decrease really is quite stunning: -50 points on net approval since January 26th (our first survey of his presidency).
The precise reason for the decline is hard to nail down. It's most likely that there's a confluence of factors that make Biden appear as not progressive enough for young adults (which is probably true?) that have driven down their views of him as the contrast vs Trump wanes
I do think the covid explanation is wrong.
For one thing, Biden's approval on how he's handling covid is higher than for any other issue.
But it also doesn't explain why young people, who are less impacted by covid, would be more affected attitudinally.
This is a good piece from @Edsall & scholars that overlaps with a lot of what I've been thinking about re: US institutions over the last yr. Should remind us of how much democracy has progressed internationally since 1787, and how little we've done at home nytimes.com/2021/12/08/opi…
As far as contemporary debates go, I think scholars are right to point out that anti-democratic institutions do much more harm to Liberal progress, the will of the majority, and the Dem Party than messaging squabbles do — even tho activists can only really influence the latter.
I do think, by the way, that the question of whether "LatinX" and "Defund" hurt Democratic candidates (by association) would be a much lesser, though not non-existent, issue in the party if the Ds didn't have to win 53%+ of voters to have a governing majority, like they do now.
I have been running some models on our YouGov/Economist data today looking into whether voters' attitudes on inflation are being driven by partisanship and, esp, Fox News, as many in the media (and especially on Twitter) are theorizing.
Some findings in this thread ⬇️
The groups most likely to say gas has gotten 'much more' expensive (v 'a little more' or not at all) are:
a) Republicans
b) Ppl 45-64
c) Ppl who watch a lot of news, but not necessarily Fox (Fox had a lower impact on attitudes than eg CNN, actually)
d) Ppl who make <50K
Groups that are LEAST likely to say gas has gotten much more expensive:
a) Democrats
b) Ppl under 30
c) Ppl who don't watch a lot of news
d) Ppl who watch MSNBC