Swing vote 'trumped' turnout in 2016 election
2021-04-21
(Press-News.org) Swing voters in battleground states delivered Donald Trump his unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election, suggests a new study coauthored by Yale political scientist Gregory A. Huber.
The study, published on April 21 in the journal Science Advances, compares the outcomes of the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in six key states: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The analysis merged voter turnout records of 37 million individuals with precinct-level election returns to determine the sources of Trump's electoral success. It examined the relative roles of conversion -- voters switching their support from one party to the other between elections -- and changes in the electorate's composition, which are driven by mobilization and variations in voter turnout.
The researchers found that conversion was the greater factor in four of the six states, including Florida and the pivotal Rust Belt states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Overall, people switching their votes from Democrat to Republican more consistently explained the GOP's success in 2016 than did increased turnout by the party's base, they concluded.
"Despite increasing political polarization, a lot of voters aren't committed partisans and will cast ballots for a Democrat in one election and a Republican in the next," said Huber, the Forst Family Professor of Political Science in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Turnout certainly matters -- the parties benefit from mobilizing their bases -- but our study suggests that swing voters were a bigger factor in 2016."
Studying the sources of electoral change is challenging. The secret ballot prevents researchers from observing individuals' vote choices. At the same time, the composition of the electorate constantly changes as people move, become eligible to vote, or fall off the voter rolls. The absence of a centralized election administration in the United States presents another obstacle.
Survey data can offer some insight into voters' choices, but its reach is limited, Huber said.
"It's fairly easy to get committed Republicans or Democrats to tell you that they support their teams, but it's much harder to reach the people who aren't partisan or don't vote consistently," he said. "Those kinds of voters are important drivers of electoral change."
Huber and coauthors Seth J. Hill of the University of California-San Diego, and Daniel J. Hopkins of the University of Pennsylvania relied on public records to avoid the recruitment bias and other shortcomings of survey data. They gathered comprehensive lists of eligible voters from each state, allowing them to identify changes in voter turnout between 2012 and 2016. They matched the voter lists to election returns at the precinct level -- the smallest geographical unit for measuring vote counts -- to estimate the extent of conversion that occurred between 2012 and 2016 in each precinct.
Trump improved on Mitt Romney's 2012 performance in each state but Georgia. The researchers found that the balance between conversion and the electorate's composition varied by state, but their analysis clearly indicated that conversion more consistently explained the pro-GOP electoral change between the two elections. Trump outperformed Romney in precincts where the electorate's composition, or turnout, remained stable between 2012 and 2016 as well as in precincts where shifts in party registrations had favored the Democrats, according to the study.
The researchers found that conversion was especially relevant in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania -- the states with the largest swings in party margin between the two elections. For example, in the average Michigan precinct, Trump netted 101 votes over Romney's 2012 total. Changes in electorate composition increased the Democratic vote total by an estimated 102 votes. To net those 101 votes, Trump gained an estimated 203 votes from voters who had cast ballots for Barack Obama in 2012, the study found. In all, the composition effect in Michigan was estimated to be only half the conversion effect.
"In a sense, the difference between composition and conversion comes down to simple math," said Huber. "Mobilizing one additional voter adds a single vote to your margin but converting a swing voter adds one to your candidate's tally while subtracting another from your opponent's," Huber noted.
In Nevada and Georgia, the estimated compositional effects were 3 and 1.4 times larger than the conversion effects. The Democrats' enhanced voter mobilization efforts in Georgia, which are credited with enabling Joe Biden's 2020 victory in the state, were already producing results in 2016, Huber explained.
"Georgia demonstrates the importance of voter mobilization," Huber said. "The Democrats had a massive expansion in registration and an enormous number of new voters entering the political system, which resulted in Trump losing votes relative to Mitt Romney. It set the stage for a surprising win in 2020."
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-04-21
Boston, MA - In a worldwide survey, pregnant and postpartum women reported high levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and post-traumatic stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Such high levels of distress may have potential implications for women and for fetal and child health and development, according to the study.
The study will be published online in PLOS ONE on April 21, 2021.
"We expected to see an increase in the proportion of pregnant and postpartum women reporting mental health distress, as they are likely to be worried or have questions about their babies' health and development, ...
2021-04-21
In the field of robotics, researchers are continually looking for the fastest, strongest, most efficient and lowest-cost ways to actuate, or enable, robots to make the movements needed to carry out their intended functions.
The quest for new and better actuation technologies and 'soft' robotics is often based on principles of biomimetics, in which machine components are designed to mimic the movement of human muscles--and ideally, to outperform them. Despite the performance of actuators like electric motors and hydraulic pistons, their rigid form limits how they can be deployed. As robots transition to more ...
2021-04-21
Researchers of the University of Barcelona, together with researchers from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and Brown University (United States), have analysed more than 10,000 evaluations that were carried out to candidates who wish to hold a public teaching permanent in Catalonia. The objective was to study how the decision by the committee of evaluators is affected by the fact that each candidate holds a certain position in the lists of people to be assessed. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, identifies a new cognitive bias that researchers have named "generosity-erosion effect". It involves that once the evaluators have scored one candidate generously, ...
2021-04-21
Brandi Wren was studying social distancing and infections before masking tape marks appeared on the grocery store floor and plastic barriers went up in the post office.
Wren, a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, spent a year studying wild vervet monkey troops in South Africa, tracking both their social grooming behavior and their parasite load. Her results, some of which were published Wednesday (April 21) in PLOS ONE showed evidence that monkeys carrying certain gastrointestinal parasites do not groom others as much as those without the parasite, and that routes of transmission may not be as clear cut as biologists think.
With implications for both animal behavior and human health, Wren's results open new avenues for research and ...
2021-04-21
Making the speed of electronic technology as fast as possible is a central aim of contemporary materials research. The key components of fast computing technologies are transistors: switching devices that turn electrical currents on and off very quickly as basic steps of logic operations. In order to improve our knowledge about ideal transistor materials, physicists are constantly trying to determine new methods to accomplish such extremely fast switches. Researchers from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg have now figured out ...
2021-04-21
Women who experience partner violence at a young age don't always show physical signs of abuse and don't always disclose -- or recognize -- the dangerous position they're in. A new study from Michigan State University is one of the first to examine multiple factors that influence young women's disclosure of partner violence that occurred during their first relationships, when they were just under 15 years old, on average.
"Physical abuse is widely understood as unhealthy, wrong and abusive, but sexual violence and coercive control are less understood and still pretty hidden, especially among young women," said Angie C. Kennedy, MSU associate professor of ...
2021-04-21
East Hanover, NJ. April 21, 2021. Kessler Foundation researchers showed that people with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience subtle language impairments that standard neuropsychological tests may incorrectly attribute to impaired executive functions. The article, "The role of language ability in verbal fluency of individuals with multiple sclerosis" (doi: 10.1016/j.msard.2021.102846) was published on February 16, 2021, in Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders.
The authors are Nancy D. Chiaravalloti, PhD, director of the Centers for Neuropsychology, Neuroscience, and Traumatic Brain Injury Research at Kessler Foundation, Lauren B. Strober, PhD, senior research scientist at the Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience ...
2021-04-21
Washington, DC-- A team of astronomers including Carnegie's Alycia Weinberger and former-Carnegie postdoc Meredith MacGregor, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun's nearest neighbor--the star Proxima Centauri.
Their work, which could help guide the search for life beyond our Solar System, is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Proxima Centauri is a "red dwarf" with about one-eighth the mass of our Sun, which sits just four light-years, or almost 25 trillion miles, from the center of our Solar System and hosts at least two planets, one of which may look something like Earth.
In a worldwide campaign carried out ...
2021-04-21
A new study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society has found that listening to music can help older adults sleep better.
Researchers from the National Cheng Kung University Hospital in Taiwan combined the results of past studies to understand the effect that listening to music can have on the quality of older adults' sleep. Their work suggests that:
- Older adults (ages 60 and up) living at home sleep better when they listen to music for 30 minutes to one hour at bedtime.
- Calm music improves older adults' sleep quality better than rhythmic music does.
- ...
2021-04-21
BUFFALO, N.Y. - 3D printing is transforming everything from fashion and health care to transportation and toys. But this rapidly evolving technology, also known as additive manufacturing, can threaten national security and intellectual property rights.
To reduce illicit use of 3D printers, Zhanpeng Jin, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, is developing a way to track the origin of 3D-printed items.
His concern was that, as long as people have the digital design for an item, which can be downloaded from the internet, sometimes as open-source material, people can print out anything they want, which can range from computer parts and toys to fully functional handguns and assault rifles.
"So, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Swing vote 'trumped' turnout in 2016 election
