Where Obama is winning and losing (Excellent statistical analysis of Obama's support)

[jefferson_dem]

Courtesy of Brendan Nyhan --

Where Obama is winning and losing

There's been some debate among pundits about where Barack Obama has been successful and why. To try to make some sense of what's going on, I decided to actually look at the data. (My pundit card will soon be revoked.)

One issue is how to compare across states given the change in the number of candidates running over time. The method I used is to focus on how well Obama did relative to Hillary Clinton by looking at the proportion of their total vote that Obama received, which (a) attempts to adjust for the departure of John Edwards and (b) contains much more information than simple win/loss tallies. (I also excluded the home states of Illinois, New York, and Arkansas and the largely uncontested states of Florida and Michigan from the analyses below.)

When you focus on Obama's proportion of the two-candidate vote, it's striking how he's run up huge margins in so many of his wins but his losses have almost all been relatively narrow:



Obama has won nine states with more than 60 percent of the two-candidate vote and three states with more than 70 percent, but he's only received less than 40 percent of the two-candidate vote once.

The first question is whether Obama is doing as well in caucuses as it appears. The answer is yes:



Weighting states equally, he's received an average of 66 percent of the two-candidate vote in caucuses and only 51 percent in primaries. Why? Kevin Drum's readers suggest the following explanations, which seem plausible, though the data can't really arbitrate between them:

Caucuses require organization and Obama was better organized. They require enthusiasm and he has more enthusiastic supporters. They require time, and his demographic has more free time. They're mostly in small states, and Obama targeted small states. They're dominated by activists, and activists tend to support Obama.

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http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2008/02/who-supports-ob.html