From novice to ninja
Use District Explorer Like a Pro
- Ben
- December 28, 2022
- No Comments
The Colorado Political District Explorer puts registration trends and competitiveness at your fingertips. This new interactive web application provides historic registration trends, current demographics, and future competitiveness. Information is available for every County, Congressional, State Senate, and State House District in Colorado.
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But that doesn’t mean it’s without value
CPR attempts election analysis. …it goes poorly.
- Ben
- November 23, 2020
- 1 Comment
Colorado Public Radio’s laudable attempt to substantiate a false claim in their story opens the door for a primer on common electoral analysis mistakes. Such as not using data from the district in question, using levels instead of rates for comparison, cherry-picking data to fit a pre-set narrative, confusing candidate and district performance, failing to account for differences in district geography, and ignoring Occam’s Razor.
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Beware these stats and those using them
Slippery Stats
- Ben
- April 18, 2020
- No Comments
We all know that data is very en vogue these days, and not just in political circles. Predictably, this has led to a proliferation of squishy math, soft stats, and outright errors. So let’s go through some of the most common political math fallacies so that you too can ridicule others for making these mistakes. Because we all know public ridicule is the most effective form of instruction.
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How CO Republicans Lose Before They Ever Start
The SD20 Fallacy
- Ben
- February 2, 2020
- No Comments
Every cycle legislative leadership spends well into the seven figures on our effort to capture or defend competitive legislative races. But our inability to understand which races are actually competitive has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars of waste each cycle and mounting losses over the decade.
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