Christmas in January
Open-source precinct data, focus grouping podcast-listening men for Trump, WAR in 2024, where polling goes next, a multiparty America, using AI to "read the bill," a home field advantage in elections
No. 345 | January 17th, 2025
🇺🇲 2024
It’s Christmas in January: The New York Times releases its very detailed map of the 2024 election.
They also open-sourcing the data powering this map and are soliciting help from readers to help collect more.
The map allows most Americans to look up how their city, neighborhood and even their block voted in the race between Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris, and see how vote margins have shifted since 2020. It currently includes results for more than 110,000 precincts, or 73 percent of all votes, and will be updated as more data is collected.
Echelon’s latest focus group with the Times is a conversation with 12 men who voted for Donald Trump and put more trust in Joe Rogan and X than they do in mainstream media:
The return of Donald Trump as president might start setting things straight — that’s the hope, at least, among the 12 men in our latest Times Opinion focus group. They all voted for Mr. Trump in November not only because they liked his views on the economy, crime and immigration but also because many of them believe he’s “a man’s man” whose government leadership and approach to American culture will help many men who feel devalued, overlooked, lost or isolated.
‘One of the reasons so many young men probably voted for Donald Trump is they're having trouble finding their way in our current society,’ argued one of our participants, Matthew, a 43-year-old from Tennessee.
Split Ticket releases their Wins Above Replacement (WAR) for the 2024 cycle.
Quoted in this Silver Bulletin piece on polling in 2024, with a look ahead at what pollsters might do differently in the 2026 midterms.
I think that there are probably fewer polls that are going to not weight on education in the future, but you're still going to have polls that do that, and those polls are going to get discussed. Because what's going to happen is those polls are going to show outlier results, and outlier results get headlines…. Obviously, you could be wrong after the election, or you could be very right…. I think in some cases people are incentivized to publish those high-variance polls that move around a lot. Because those tend to generate more headlines.
🗺️ Data Visualization
What would Congress look like in a multiparty democracy with proportional representation? I personally don’t think it would be as different as the authors argue, but the data visualization here is top-notch.
👫 Demographics
The fall in fertility is really about the great uncoupling.
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
The Congress in Your Pocket app utilizes AI to “read the bill,” even if it’s thousands of pages long. Congrats to Michael Cohen and team on this amazing accomplishment!
The core issue to solve was that congressional legislation is long and so your basic chatbot experiences won’t do. We had to figure out how to break legislation into finer pieces for processing then recombine them into a summary that made sense for the average voter. On that, I’ll keep the details private but let’s just say there was a lot of hard work involved.
The result is that you can now get a summary of any piece of legislation distilled down into a couple of paragraphs, generally one or two screens on an iPhone. We also offer the full text of the bill so you could read the whole thing if the summary piques your interest.
We envision this for two separate groups: voters and policy professionals. Voters can get the most benefit because they generally don’t follow even major bills closely. After hearing about a major health, immigration, or tax bill they can look it up and get a quick summary. If they want to learn more they can see who is sponsoring it, where it is in the process, as well as the entire text if they have that kind of time.
A look at how students use of GPT-4 may affect their ability to learn.
🔬 Academia
Is there a home area bonus in play when lower-level officeholders run for higher office?
😂 Humor
When can we start making predictions for the next Presidential election?
Thank you so much for mentioning the work we did on AI, Patrick. Truly appreciate it. The team did a phenomenal job of bringing this idea of mine, making "reading the bill" easier, to mobile.
Thank you for sharing this, Patrick. Regarding the NYT's precinct data for Virginia, I wonder if they aren't making a serious mistake: they note that *provisionals* are tabulated at the county / independent city level, but the same is also true of *early in-person votes* and *absentee votes* - which are far more numerous.
Any idea whether they allocated those and how? I'm e-mailing them and will post a reply.