Below are research papers and projects that I completed throughout graduate school and college, all centered on data-driven election analysis.
Graduate School
- Evaluating polling averages in the 2020 election, including discussion on the merits and drawbacks of more complex approaches to poll aggregation
- Reviewing academic literature on presidential election forecasting, beginning with the history of the field and ending with the newest model designs
- Reviewing academic literature on congressional election forecasting, detailing differences between House and Senate models alongside potential areas for improvement
- Visualizing a storyboard of Cooperative Election Study (CES/CCES) survey data, showing how different demographic coalitions voted in the 2008–2020 presidential elections
- Overviewing the effect of the incumbency advantage in House elections as well as suggestions on how to better quantify it, serving as a response to two major papers on the topic
Senior Year
- Summarizing my experiences with this blog and musing on the field of data journalism (this is my undergraduate thesis)
- Outlining the 2020 elections for President, House, and Senate in mid-May and from 30,000 feet. (Some of the analysis is a tad outdated today, unfortunately.)
- Overviewing three major electoral reform efforts in the United States: the role of money in politics, issues of representation, and ballot access
- Describing three proposed solutions to electoral reform: automatic voter registration, voting by mail, and the restoration of felons’ voting rights
- Proposing my own original electoral system that appears democratic but is actually corrupt. (This one was a lot of fun!)
- Analyzing which factors best predicted state-level turnout during the 2016 presidential election, using a range of regression diagnostics
Junior Year
- Discussing media coverage and public perceptions surrounding polls (particularly during the 2018 midterm elections)
- Examining polling ‘bounces’ for presidential candidates following their nominating conventions
I also have a github page that contains the code for one or two of these projects, but apart from that I honestly don’t use it much.
minor housekeeping note:
this page streamlines content found in the
Research / Papers / Projects category.
First Past the Poll 