Author Archives: jon

Council District 2: East Village, Gramercy Park, Kips Bay, Lower East Side, Murray Hill, Rose Hill An artifact of the way in which Bloomberg and his City Council extended their leadership by an additional term is that most of the current crop of officials came into office in 2013, ran for re-election in 2017 and […]

NYC is having its municipal election in 2021. We are covering every candidate in the universe. We rely on the CFB Candidates List to curate this data. Some filed committees may nonetheless file no financial activity whatsoever too: out of 397 committees that exist, 372 have filed transactions with the Campaign Finance Board (CFB) as […]

The struggle continues, comrades! In the latest skirmish for the soul of the United States of America, some of our biggest banks have announced that they “are pausing all political donations.” My own take is that banks want to be seen “helping” and then will resume doing what they always do. Bankers gonna bank, you […]

We looked at the 1-05 Senate Extra-Double-Vaganza in comparison to the 11-05 General election contest. Perdue-Ossoff (11/3); Warnock-Loeffler (11/3); Perdue-Ossoff (1/5); and Warnock-Loeffler (1/5). And it is clear: because everybody had a go in November, this was definitely a turnout election. We decided to look at how sharply turnout fell–because it fell everywhere–and who that […]

Tuesday, January 5, 2021 brings a special election day to the Peach State. We are mapping it live right as polls close. Two different US Senate seats are in the contest. This typically never happens within one of our states because of the Senate’s class system, wherein all sitting Senators comprise three different election classes […]

We mapped the average age of voters who participated in the 11-03-20 General election, and bucketed those ages into cohorts, so that the map highlights the average voter age in each ED. While we typically use opacity to display continuous values, such as percentages, a linear color gradient is more appropriate for moving between categorical, […]

Quantization is the process of mapping input values from a large (or continuous set) to output values in a (more countable) smaller set. “Rounding” and “truncation” are typical quantization processes that you hear about. Going to percentiles, quartiles, or quintiles are others. When we work on voter models, for instance, our clients are usually looking […]

One of our crawlers takes in both “Unofficial” and then “Certified” election returns in NY starting right as polls close. In addition to the vote counts themselves, this dataset includes some interesting features such as how many ballots were counted by the “Public Counter”–viz. at the poll-site–or via an alternative process, such as the “Absentee […]

In the common parlance of campaigns a Universe is the set of voters who will be sought via a given contact means. For instance, a “text universe” is the list of people you text, while a “call universe” is the list that gets cut up for your phone banks. A “direct mail universe” is what […]

Who is going to turn out for a municipal election held in an off-year, in an off-brand month, in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, and under conditions of a pandemic? That is the question we seek to answer with Turnout Modeling. For starters, and even before accounting for the new world of Ranked […]