Below I’ve linked some of the research papers, projects, and assignments that I’ve completed over the years for graduate school and college, all fitting with the themes of this blog.
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 (Some of the analysis is a tad outdated today, unfortunately.)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.
This page streamlines the content found in the Research / Papers / Projects category.
First Past the Poll 