This is the first part of three posts analyzing the 2010 South Carolina gubernatorial election, in which Republican Nikki Haley won a closer-than-expected victory over Democrat Vincent Sheheen. The main focus of these posts will be to explore whether a racial effect accounted for Ms. Haley's unexpected poor performance.
This is a part of a series of posts analyzing the 2010 midterm elections. This post will focus on the Illinois Senate election, in which Republican candidate Mark Kirk pulled out a close Republican victory in a strongly Democratic state.
The state of Texas is one of the Republican Party's most valuable strongholds. It adds a good 38 electoral votes to the Republican candidate's electoral vote; Democrats have not been competitive in the state for at least a decade.
One of the only Democratic regions in Texas lies along the Rio Grande River:
This is a part of a series of posts analyzing the 2010 midterm elections. This post will discuss the 2010 Florida gubernatorial election, which Republican candidate Rick Scott won in an extremely close contest.
Florida's Gubernatorial Election
On November 2010, Democrat Alex Sink faced an extremely flawed Republican opponent: multimillionaire Rick Scott, a businessman accused of heading the biggest fraud in Medicare history.
Ms. Sink still lost, running in a Republican leaning state in a very Republican environment. Here is what happened:
Asians are one of the most ignored constituencies in American politics. When most politicians think about the Asian vote, they don't.
Yet the Asian-American population is increasing, both in absolute terms and relative ones. By 2050, the Census estimates that Asians will compose 7.8% of the American population. Although their voting rates will still fall far short of this, the population is becoming more influential. Predicting their future voting path therefore has some utility.
In previous posts, this blogger has argued that the Latino vote will likely trend Republican, as Latinos follow the path of previous immigrants and become more assimilated.
This is the first part of two posts analyzing patterns in the 2010 Senate midterm elections. The second part can be found here.
The 2010 congressional midterm elections constituted, by and large, a victory for the Republican Party. In the Senate Republicans gained six seats. While this was somewhat below expectations, it was much better than Republican hopes just after 2008 - when many expected the party to actually lose seats.
The Senate results provide some interesting fodder for analysis. The table below indicates which Republicans Senate candidates did the worst in 2008. It does so by taking the Republican margin of victory or defeat in a given state and subtracting this by the Cook PVI of the state (the Cook PVI is how a state would be expected to vote in a presidential election in the event of an exact tie nationwide). Given that Republicans won the nationwide vote this year, the average Republican candidate would be expected to do better than the state's PVI. A bad Republican candidate would actually do worse than the state's PVI.
On May 7th of 2010, the United Kingdom held a general election to determine its new prime minister. While the Conservative Party gained a number of seats, this was not enough to ensure a majority. Fears of a hung Parliament subsided, however, when the Conservatives joined with the Liberal Democrats to form a governing coalition.
Here is a map of the general election:
This map indicates the number of seats won by each party in the general election. Red - the traditional color for socialism - is the color of the leftist Labour Party; blue the color of the conservative Tories; yellow the color of the Liberal Democrats.
To follow up the series of posts on Colorado, I've posted a few recent presidential elections in the state (courtesy of the New York Times). Each map comes with some brief analysis.
Boosted by a Democratic National Convention held in Denver, Senator Barack Obama wins a thorough victory in the ultimate swing state of 2008. The Democratic candidate does especially well in the Republican-leaning suburbs of Denver - winning several outright and dampening margins in Douglas County and Colorado Springs.
