A student of mine, Richard Carpenter, has some interesting graphs and discussion of voting participation in the US compared to population on his blog. At various times in this election both candidates discussed the notion that they are brining new people to the voting booths, though I think we need to wait and see before declaring this some type of transformational election.
Let’s get this out of the way at the start: the information contained here is not a predictive model of the outcome of the election and it is nothing official from UND. It is me on my own time putting this together because of some of the questions from JT on the radio show. As far as the predictive aspects, there are too many moving parts and too little data to adequately model the outcome at this point. We can develop numerous rules and test them as outcomes, but at the end it will still be a subjective probability model.
This issue seems to have died as far as national media coverage which is unfortunate because it really needs more attention. Unfortunately it seems even a faux scandal is not enough to make necessary changes.
It seems odd to think that we should now feel happier given that the responsibility for solving the immediate fiscal mess falls to the Senate. The House and the Senate Republicans have been at odds with each other publicly over the last several weeks. A significant part of the issue is the difference in electoral concerns for Senators when compared to the Representatives from the House. Larger electoral districts generally include more diverse sets of opinions and as a result the entirety of a state requires differing approaches from the House districts.