Politics
ELECTIONS 2020: Projecting eligible voters by state
Political punditry and polls often form the basis for predicting election results, but rarely are they consistent or comprehensive. Given the importance of state-level voting, and the central role played by the Electoral College in the democratic process, projecting the…
Is congressional representation keeping pace with population growth?
Photo by Lawrence Jackson on Encyclopedia Britannica Last year, I examined how national population growth and the cap on the size of the U.S. House of Representatives has contributed to the formation of extremely large House districts. The graph below…
U.S. House districts are colossal. What’s the right size?
The recent wave of populism and anti-establishment voting behavior in the United States made me want to take a closer look at how the structure of the U.S. political representation system might be contributing to the development of these sentiments.…
The geography of Virginia’s presidential primary
Hillary Clinton won a majority in the Virginia Democratic primary on March 1st, while Donald Trump took a plurality of voters in the Republican primary. The Republican primary generated record voter turnout. Nearly 4 times as many votes were cast…
Where Virginia legislators went to college
The Washington Post recently published a graphic showing where the 100 U.S. senators went to college. It might be nothing more than an interesting bit of biographical information about our elected officials, but it could also be meaningful. For educated…
The Farm Bill’s odd couple: SNAP and agriculture
In January, I spent some time discussing SNAP in Virginia here and here; at the time, there was a lot of hypothesizing about what kinds of changes were in store for the program.In early February, the Farm Bill was passed…
A map that shows what’s wrong with Washington
The recent government shutdown and flirtation with default has seriously deteriorated public trust in Congress, and in Washington more generally. Disgust with Washington is often followed by bewilderment. How did things get this way?While there is no single answer to…
Virginia, voting rights, and the removal of the preclearance requirement
The recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Right Act will have wide repercussions, particularly for Virginia, a state which was previously held to the preclearance requirement that was just struck down on Tuesday.For those who are unfamiliar with the…
New Demographic Data on the 2012 Presidential Election
The recent release of the Census Bureau’s Voting and Registration data from the Current Population Survey finally allows us to look deeper into the population that turned out to vote this last November. And the results are quite astonishing.For the first…
Viable electoral college reform?
Artist Neil Freeman published a map of the United States redrawn to have 50 states with equal population, an art project that addresses what he says is “the fundamental problem of the electoral college”: “that the states of the United…