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David Byler Profile picture
David Byler
@databyler
VP at NRG | Public opinion researcher | Formerly @washingtonpost political data journalist | Dad, people person, math person!
Nov 7, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
nate -- "closing time" is right there I will say that parenting has given me *lots* of opportunities to change the words to popular songs, but make them about baby stuff
Nov 3, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I'm sympathetic to this, and I hope Natalie is right!

I think I've become a little more pessimistic over time? Short thread This is just one person's experience:

In pieces where I have the core super wonk audience, people love the uncertainty and are receptive to creative forms

But when the audience gets broader, tolerance/desire for something that isn't certain / a point estimate gets lower
Sep 12, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
That last line is important and gets memory holed

In our Years of Great Polling Error, many campaigns consultants etc basically agreed with the public consensus!

The inside scoop is always all-knowing in retrospect TBH I noticed trad reporters doing the same thing after the 2016 election. Beforehand, they were pretty confident of a HRC win. Afterwards, it was Only Shoe Leather Reporting that called it

Which is not to indict either group. It's just a human tendency to rewrite errors
Aug 3, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Trump's position in the 2024 primary has deteriorated over the last ~year

Possible reasons:
- He's less distinctive than he used to be: Rs have other options
- The Big Lie, as a signature issue, is less profitable than it seems

New piece!

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/… Before digging in -- I don't have a strong view on what Trump's probability of winning was at any time in 2016. TBH I've given up on that argument

But comparing Trump + the GOP now to where it was in 2015/16 is instructive
Nov 10, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Alright. I've got a new piece on WHY people still think Trump won, deny Biden's victory, etc. a full *year* and audits later

I'll take the highlights, one at a time, in this thread. And try not to lose wifi in the airport.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… First things first -- some part of the losing party *always* thinks there's fraud. Especially in close races.

Psychologically, it's a lot like what happens in sports. If your team is losing, you're more likely to blame the refs.

And the people most attached to the most denying
Oct 6, 2021 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
New piece up! This is one I'm pretty excited about :)

It's an interactive quiz about conspiracy theories!

Basically it does two things:
**Gauges if people can tell conspiracy theory from fact
**Shows how hugely widespread conspiracy theories are

washingtonpost.com/opinions/inter… So the quiz is built on an academic survey from 2020

The most important finding, IMO, is that **91%** of Americans agree to one on this list.

Basically everyone believes something that counts as a conspiracy theory!
Jun 2, 2021 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Florida was "supposed" to turn blue: it has big cities, a diversifying population, immigration.

But instead it went right.

New piece on why: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… In the piece, I talk about a couple things.

One big one: population growth outside rural areas

This is not a state where only Orlando has been growing or something -- it's a state with a lot of smaller metros where Republicans are more successful
Apr 1, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
if you look at california in/out migration by key state and region, patterns emerge

--a couple states (e.g. AZ, TX) get many CA out-migrants
--northeast net sends people to CA
--nearby cheaper states get a LOT of CA expats

made these while writing this: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… (and those are the same map, just some lines show up better with the straight lines vs the arcs)
Mar 31, 2021 • 16 tweets • 6 min read
california had pretty amazing population growth for over a century -- but recently (as in pre-COVID) the state basically stopped growing

why? people moving to other states, a baby bust, and decreased immigration

and those are all bad things

new piece:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… the first really striking trend i found in the data:

the california exodus is a 30 year phenomenon.

people didn't just start leaving the state during covid or something. CA has been losing people to other states for decades
Feb 18, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
new piece on state legislatures!

basically it's a deep dive on how we got from democratic domination 40 years ago to GOP wins now
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… before you yell at me about the alaska house -- when i'm talking about 2020 results, i talk about Rs winning b/c more Rs won. when i talk about who has control, i have it as split (you'll see notes in the piece)

OKAY here is the content:
Jan 20, 2021 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
didn't intend this to be an inauguration themed piece, but timing sort of worked out that way!

biden won 15 million more votes than HRC. so where did they come from?

answer: everywhere, but disproportionately from major metros

new piece! washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… a few things right off the bat

i used CBSA divisions from OMB for metro areas. if you've got a question about how a city got a total, that's how

election results are from Dave Leip

this is the sequel to my piece on how Trump got 11 million more votes

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Jan 7, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
one thing i keep coming back to is the 2016 GOP primary

everyone knew who trump was
he was more vulnerable then than at almost any other time
many in the GOP wanted him gone
and almost everyone made *awful* moves/mistakes

such a big failure, w huge consequences a couple thoughts related to this

easy to forget that trump was disliked by a looot of Rs before getting the nomination. obvs different now

given how close he got to winning the EC in 2020, probably fair to say primary was one of his weakest moments
Jan 5, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
ANALYSIS: If Ossoff wins more votes than Perdue, he'll become a Senator. But if Perdue wins, he gets another term. LEDE: In Tuesday's Senate elections, only one thing matters: who wins the Senate elections.
Jan 5, 2021 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
trump lost, but he got a lot more votes than he did in 2016. so where did he add votes? and what does it mean?

i've got a new piece on that exact question!

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

(also i'm working on a biden version, that'll come later) ImageImageImage a few disclaimers right off the top

*the vote totals are from dave leip
*the metro areas are defined using the OMB county-based metro areas. link in piece
*this isn't individual-level data, but i still think you can learn from diff levels of agglomeration
Nov 9, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
i have this feeling that shy trump is about to take on like 8 different definitions i've seen a couple things floating around today that are like "shy trump is real!" but it meant non-response or people feeling personally sheepish about their vote (regardless of what they're saying to pollsters)
May 1, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
i wrote about justin amash! basically

if the election is close

and

he maintains enough votes to actually matter

and

he takes mostly from one candidate

------> people have license to freak out. but none of those ^ conditions are close to given

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/… basically my thinking is that some chunk of the conventional wisdom jumped straight to "amash is running oh my god he's going to spoil it for biden"

which could happen but there are quite a few, completely not certain at all, things that would have to happen first
Jan 9, 2020 • 18 tweets • 17 min read
Sooo I have an exciting new experimental thing to show you guys! It’s the post opinions simulator. It’s a model-powered Build Your Own Election interactive for Iowa (w/other versions later)!

washingtonpost.com/elections/post…

Also some deets about how I think about this, math, etc
1/ Here’s how I think about it: everyone has simplified representations of how elections work in their brain -- qualitative or quantitative. IOW everyone is a modeler.

Everyone can sorta run through different scenarios on their model: if X happened, how would it change things
2/
Sep 5, 2019 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
My meta theory on Trump is still that he never really updated his playbook/personality/strategy from the GOP primary.

It worked well enough to barely win a general election against HRC, but it hurt him in the midterms and makes him unpopular now.

And imo that explains a lot Like the strategy is

Be super restrictionist on immigration

Be loudly "politically incorrect" on tons of stuff

Dominate media coverage all the time, even if it means doubling down on your negative qualities

Outsource issues you don't care about to existing GOP politicians
Oct 31, 2018 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Latest piece is on Texas Senate, and I argue

1) Cruz has been ahead this whole time
2) This election is way more normal/generic than coverage suggests
3) We're obsessed w/Texas b/c we believe that it shows us the future
4) It actually doesn't

weeklystandard.com/david-byler/th… The first point is actually pretty easy to make. These are model results -- a version w/ just polling data and with polling plus other data sources

Cruz has always had a solid win probability. Not an unbeatable advantage. But there hasn't been as much change as people think here
Jul 9, 2018 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I got polling data on over 3000 Trump tweets and found

1) They're are generally not super popular
2) Some the least popular tweets were insults
3) Some of the most popular tweets were boring ceremonial things
4) Rs, Ds sort of of agree on a lot of them

weeklystandard.com/david-byler/yo… Data is from YouGov's Tweet Index: tweetindex.yougov.com

They've been getting national samples to rate Trump's tweets for like a year and a half ish. The scale is "Great" "Good" "OK" "Bad" "Terrible" for every tweet

That gets translated into a numerical score --> Tweet Index!