Electoral College Votes Research Articles

Emotional aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election: a study of hindsight bias in younger and older adults

ABSTRACT Hindsight bias – also known as the knew-it-all-along effect – is a ubiquitous judgment error affecting decision makers. Hindsight bias has been shown to vary across age groups and as a function of contextual factors, such as the decision maker’s emotional state. Despite theoretical reasons why emotions might have a stronger impact on hindsight bias in older than in younger adults, age differences in hindsight bias for emotional events remain relatively underexplored. We examined emotion and hindsight bias in younger and older adults (N = 272) against the backdrop of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Participants predicted electoral college votes for the two presidential candidates before the election and were asked to remember their predictions approximately three weeks later, after the election results had been finalised. Republicans, for whom the electoral outcome was negatively tinged, exhibited greater hindsight bias for President Biden’s result compared with Democrats, for whom the electoral outcome was positive. The asymmetry in hindsight bias between Republicans and Democrats was similar for younger and older participants. This study suggests that negative emotions may exacerbate hindsight bias, and that adult age differences in hindsight bias observed in laboratory settings may not translate to real-world contexts.

Forecasting Popular Vote and Electoral College Vote Results: Partisan-Bounded Economic Model

Forecasting Popular Vote and Electoral College Vote Results: Partisan-Bounded Economic Model

Deciphering Autonomous Vehicle Regulations with Machine Learning

The emergence of autonomous vehicles (AVs) presents a transformative shift in transportation, promising enhanced safety and economic efficiency. However, a fragmented legislative landscape across the United States hampers AV deployment. This fragmentation creates significant challenges for AV manufacturers and stakeholders. This research contributes by employing advanced machine learning (ML) techniques to analyze state data, aiming to identify factors associated with the likelihood of passing AV-friendly legislation, particularly regarding the requirement for human backup drivers. The findings reveal a nuanced interplay of socio-economic, political, demographic, and safety-related factors influencing the nature of AV legislation. Key variables such as democratic electoral college votes per capita, port tons per capita, population density, road fatalities per capita, and transit agency needs significantly impact legislative outcomes. These insights suggest that a combination of political, economic, and safety considerations shape AV legislation, transcending traditional partisan divides. These findings offer a strategic perspective for developing a harmonized regulatory approach, potentially at the federal level, to foster a conducive environment for AV development and deployment.

One Person, One Vote and the Constitutionality of the Winner-Take-All Allocation of Electoral College Votes

One Person, One Vote and the Constitutionality of the Winner-Take-All Allocation of Electoral College Votes

PACs and January 6th: Campaign finance and objections to the Electoral College vote count

Are members of Congress who receive more of their campaign funding from organized interests more supportive of democratic norms compared to members who receive more of their contributions from individual donors? We analyze the campaign receipts of Republican House members in the 2020 campaign cycle and votes to object to electors for Joe Biden from Arizona and Pennsylvania and find that greater contributions to members’ campaigns from business PACs are associated with a lower probability that members voted to object to electors. Further, members’ own margin of victory in 2020 has no association with these votes when controlling for other factors, but members from districts where Trump performed better are more likely to have objected to counting Electoral College votes for his opponent. Our results demonstrate a positive association between campaign contributions from corporate PACs and support for democratic institutions within the Republican caucus in the U.S. House.

A proposal to strengthen Indonesian democracy

AbstractFor centuries, Java‐based rulers employed economic, political, and military measures to control the myriad islands lying in the eastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelago. Following Indonesia's transformation into a presidential democracy, the country's leaders modified this strategy and sought to maintain regional control by implementing economic and political decentralization measures on a massive scale. These measures also gave the eastern populations an appreciable influence on presidential elections. However, population projections and recent election data indicate that inhabitants of eastern Indonesia may become electorally marginalized because the region's population growth is being far outpaced by that of Java and Sumatra. Such marginalization could lead to social unrest, separatist movements, and other malevolent behaviors that threaten the country's democracy. To address this scenario, this article suggests that implementing a presidential voting framework based on the US Electoral College could strengthen Indonesia's democracy by significantly empowering voters in the country's eastern provinces.

#MeToo, Intersectionality, and Community Conversation Frames: A Social Network Analysis of Midterm Election “Resistance” Tweets

This study examines Twitter “resistance” discourse leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, which was widely viewed as a response to the 2016 presidential election then President Donald J. Trump won a majority of electoral college votes while Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. When analyzing randomly selected tweets with the term “resistance” social networks emerged discussing multiple associated terms with “resistance.” Once mapping these networks, the conversation frames that drove discourse across the virtual communities included the most used frame, the #MeToo frame, along with intersectionality and community-building frames. The results of the 2016 presidential election, and Trump's victory, enabled by explicit appeals to race and gender stereotypes, prompted a wave of civic activism, included in the social media conversations outlined in this study.

A stakeholder-based framework for improving the resilience of groundwater resources in arid regions

In this paper, a new stakeholder-based framework is proposed for groundwater resources management in arid regions. In this framework, rough set theory is used for the probabilistic classification of stakeholders considering their powers and interests, which are obtained from stakeholder analysis. Then, a system dynamics model is developed to evaluate the physical, economic, environmental, and social conditions of the system corresponding to each defined water resources management scenario. Moreover, an evidential reasoning approach is used to estimate the resilience of scenarios based on seven generic resilience principles. Finally, based on the results of stakeholder analysis, system dynamics modeling, and resilience analysis, groundwater management scenarios are ranked using a proposed social choice procedure called Electoral College Voting. The results of applying the methodology to the Rafsanjan plain in Iran illustrate that a scenario that includes modern irrigation systems and water transfer is the socially optimal scenario in the study area. Implementing this scenario reduces water consumption by 40%, improves the resilience of groundwater by about 50% and helps the aquifer to be recovered.

Bent but Not Broken: The Constitutional, Legal, and Procedural Issues in the 2020 Electoral College Vote Certification

After the raw votes in the 2016 U.S. presidential election were tallied and showed Donald Trump to be the Electoral College victor, Democrats protested in Trump-won states, asking Electoral College members to vote with their conscience and against their state’s popular vote. On January 6, 2021, supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol demanding that the certification of the Electoral College vote in favor of Joe Biden not move forward. Are the laws, court decisions, and the Constitution itself set up to cause such an uproar around a routine item? Was the 2021 iteration of counting the Electoral College votes an aberration, or is this the new normal? This article examines the constitutional, legal, and procedural issues around the Electoral College certification vote. The author investigates the constitutional beginnings of the system for electing the U.S. president and discusses “faithless electors” and the power that 538 individuals have in the presidential selection process every 4 years. The author concludes with a discussion of the 2021 Electoral College vote certification and the mob that attempted to stop it.

Using Facebook data to predict the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

We use 19 billion likes on the posts of top 2000 U.S. fan pages on Facebook from 2015 to 2016 to measure the dynamic ideological positions for politicians, news outlets, and users at the national and state levels. We then use these measures to derive support rates for 2016 presidential candidates in all 50 states, to predict the election, and to compare them with state-level polls and actual vote shares. We find that: (1) Assuming that users vote for candidates closer to their own ideological positions, support rates calculated using Facebook predict that Trump will win the electoral college vote while Clinton will win the popular vote. (2) State-level Facebook support rates track state-level polling averages and pass the cointegration test, showing two time series share similar trends. (3) Compared with actual vote shares, polls generally have smaller margin of errors, but polls also often overestimate Clinton’s support in right-leaning states. Overall, we provide a method to forecast elections at low cost, in real time, and based on passively revealed preference and little researcher discretion.

Regional heterogeneity and U.S. presidential elections: Real-time 2020 forecasts and evaluation

This paper exploits cross-sectional variation at the level of U.S. counties to generate real-time forecasts for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The forecasting models are trained on data covering the period 2000–2016, using high-dimensional variable selection techniques. Our county-based approach contrasts the literature that focuses on national and state level data but uses longer time periods to train their models. The paper reports forecasts of popular and electoral college vote outcomes and provides a detailed ex-post evaluation of the forecasts released in real time before the election. It is shown that all of these forecasts outperform autoregressive benchmarks. A pooled national model using One-Covariate-at-a-time-Multiple-Testing (OCMT) variable selection significantly outperformed all models in forecasting the U.S. mainland national vote share and electoral college outcomes (forecasting 236 electoral votes for the Republican party compared to 232 realized). This paper also shows that key determinants of voting outcomes at the county level include incumbency effects, unemployment, poverty, educational attainment, house price changes, and international competitiveness. The results are also supportive of myopic voting: economic fluctuations realized a few months before the election tend to be more powerful predictors of voting outcomes than their long-horizon analogs.

Androgyny and the 2020 US Presidential Election: The Benefits of a “Balanced” Ticket?

Data gathered from 667 respondents during the 2020 U S presidential election showed that, in contrast to previous studies of presidential leadership, the Ideal President was viewed as androgynous (i.e., balanced in masculine and feminine traits) rather than masculine. None of the four (President and Vice-President) major party candidates fit the ideal profile perfectly. Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Kamala Harris were perceived as higher on masculinity than femininity, whereas Joe Biden was perceived as higher in femininity than masculinity. Compared to the White male candidates, Harris, a woman of color, was most notably perceived as the opposite of her running mate Biden in both masculinity and femininity. Male and female respondents perceived the Ideal President differently, men as higher in masculinity than femininity and women as higher in femininity than masculinity. Respondents’ presidential candidate preferences were related to their descriptions of the Ideal President: Trump supporters perceived the Ideal President as higher in masculinity than femininity, whereas Biden supporters perceived the Ideal President as balanced in masculinity and femininity. The Democratic ticket as a whole represented a balanced team, with one candidate higher on femininity and the other higher on masculinity; in essence, an androgynous ticket. In contrast, the Republican ticket as a whole represented a decidedly masculine team. That the Democratic ticket clearly won the election (both the popular vote and the electoral college vote) with an androgynous ticket raises the question of whether the relationship between gender and leader stereotypes has shifted towards a more level playing field for female vis-à-vis male candidates for leader roles.

Would Forty States Creating Amendments to Their Constitutions to Direct Their Electoral College Votes to the Winner of the National Popular Vote Create a Constitutional Crisis?

Would Forty States Creating Amendments to Their Constitutions to Direct Their Electoral College Votes to the Winner of the National Popular Vote Create a Constitutional Crisis?

Electoral Systems and Inequalities in Government Interventions

Abstract This paper studies the political determinants of inequalities in government interventions under majoritarian (MAJ) and proportional representation (PR) systems. We propose a probabilistic voting model of electoral competition with highly targetable government interventions and heterogeneous localities. We uncover a novel relative electoral sensitivity effect that affects government interventions only under MAJ systems. This effect tends to reduce inequality in government interventions under MAJ systems when districts are composed of sufficiently homogeneous localities. This effect goes against the conventional wisdom that MAJ systems are necessarily more conducive to inequality than PR systems. We illustrate the empirical relevance of our results with numerical simulations on possible reforms of the US Electoral College.

Exploring the Politics and Policy of the Great Plains

Exploring the Politics and Policy of the Great Plains Joe Blankenau and Brian Hanson From romantic musings to boorish mockery, analyses of the United States' Great Plains are often simplistic for a region that defies easy explanation. One persistent misconception about the Great Plains is its lack of relevance to the rest of the country. In the political realm, this is simply false. As a result of the Great Compromise, which was essential to the creation of the US Constitution, each state has two senators regardless of population size, so Wyoming (pop. 577,719), South Dakota (pop. 887,770), and North Dakota (pop.779,702) each has the same amount of power in the Senate as does California (pop. 39,576,757) (US Census Bureau 2021). The 10 states that are partially, or entirely, located in the Great Plains, are home to 20 Senate seats that can, among other activities, determine the flow of legislation in Congress, shape what the judiciary will look like, and provide their imprint on how America will interact with other countries through treaties. In modern times, the Senate has very narrow margins, so every Senate seat has enormous influence on politics and policy. The region's political relevance is not just found in the Senate but also in the House of Representatives, which allocates seats based upon population size, giving the Great Plains states 68 seats. These seats matter, as the House of Representatives also often has close margins and has gone through three changes of party control in the 21st century. Voting for the presidency through the Electoral College also gives significant power to the Great Plains, as the region has 88 electoral votes granted in winner-take-all fashion to the winner of the popular vote in each state (except Nebraska, which allocates an Electoral College vote to the winner in each House district). People argue over the fairness of so much weight given to a relatively little-populated region, but the reality is that the rules of the game do give this weight, so the region is relevant and needs more attention from those who study politics and policy. Toward this end, this special edition contains articles on the politics and policy of the Great Plains along with the transcripts of an interview for the annual Warner Lecture sponsored by the University of Nebraska at Kearney. The works here provide a unique contribution to our understanding of the interplay between culture, politics, and government in the Great Plains. They provide us with a deeper understanding of what defines this region on key issues such as COVID-19, changing demographics, guns, religion, language, health care, and education. We learn much about how people think about and act on these issues, and in the process we can garner significant insight into how these issues play out not only in the Great Plains but also in the country writ large. The edition begins with a transcript from the 2020 Warner Lecture that reveals insights about education in the Great Plains from two experienced and thoughtful school superintendents regarding their experience facing challenges and opportunities in areas such as diversity, the COVID-19 pandemic, changing demographics, and more. The work of educators in the Great Plains is laying the foundation for the future of life here, and their conversation could not be more relevant in revealing the dynamics of this process. Next is an examination of COVID-19 responses in Nebraska and Kansas. Middlewood and Joslyn show how social capital affected community responses, finding that Nebraska and Kansas counties with greater social capital performed better on social distancing, a key strategy to mitigate the pandemic. The history of the Great Plains is one of change, and Rodriguez adeptly describes how Latinos are increasingly becoming an [End Page ix] important part of the political landscape of Kansas. Rodriguez points out that Latinos make up 12% of the population in Kansas, a fact that has clearly played a role in recent elections. Middlewood illustrates how rural Great Plains gun owners are politically influential on gun policy, especially with the region's skewed representation in national political institutions. Gun ownership has a greater effect on political participation in rural...

18. Association Between State-level Voting Patterns and Prior Receipt of the HPV Vaccine, an Analysis Using Data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2016 – 2018

BackgroundHuman papillomavirus (HPV) is the main cause of cervical, anal and oro-pharyngeal cancer worldwide. The HPV vaccine can prevent over 90% of HPV-related malignancies but vaccination rates in the United State (US) vary significantly by region. In this study, we assessed whether state-level politics is associated with receipt of HPV vaccination in the US, and if the association is modified by sex and age.MethodsThis study analyzed data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. Persons ages 18 to 36 years of age, who lived in 17 states that included the supplementary “Adult Human Papillomavirus (HPV)” module questionnaire in 2016, 2017 or 2018, were included. We compared self-reported receipt of HPV vaccination among persons living in Republican versus Democratic states, based on state electoral college votes in the 2016 US presidential election. Mantel-Haenszel stratified analysis was used to estimate prevalence ratios and to assess for effect modification and control for confounding.ResultsOverall, 36,334 survey respondents were included in the analysis, 22.7% of whom reported prior receipt of the HPV vaccine, 28.1% in Democratic states and 20.4% in Republican states. When adjusted for race, living in a Democratic state was associated with a higher prevalence of prior receipt of the HPV vaccine in comparison to living in a Republican state. This association was strongest for men less than 26 years of age (PR 1.77, 95% CI: 1.58, 1.98) but remained significant for men ages 26 – 36 years (PR 1.51, 95% CI: 1.24, 1.85), women less than 26 years of age (PR 1.20, 95% CI: 1.13, 1.27), and women ages 26 – 36 years (PR 1.69, 95% CI: 1.57, 1.83).ConclusionOverall HPV vaccine coverage was low in adults 18–36 years of age. The strong association between state-level voting patterns and prior receipt of the HPV vaccine suggests that HPV vaccine coverage is lower in Republican states when compared to Democratic states. Further public health efforts are needed to promote HPV vaccine uptake among young men and women, particularly in Republican voting states.Disclosures All Authors: No reported disclosures

A Political Canary: An Empirical Study of the Correlation Between Hatch Act Complaints and How the Electoral College Votes

The American public witnesses hundreds, if not thousands, of Hatch Act violations—an administrative law designed to keep partisan politics out of Government—each year. This study aims to determine whether there is a correlation between the number of Hatch Act complaints reported in the fiscal year leading up to a Presidential election and how divisive the political landscape is during that Presidential election. In this study, political divisiveness was defined as how close the winning Presidential candidate was to receiving fifty percent of the electoral college. To test the theory that an increase in Hatch Act complaints leads to a closer Presidential election, the study researched forty years of Hatch Act records and developed a prediction model using multiple regression. The results of this regression model showed that a negative correlation existed between the percent change in Hatch Act complaints during the fiscal year leading up to a Presidential election and the margin by which a Presidential candidate won the election. The regression model created in this study accurately predicted the electoral college results for eight of the past ten Presidential elections; predicting both the 2016 and the 2020 elections within one electoral vote (p ≤ 0.05). These results verify the need for increased funding for enforcement of Hatch Act violations during the years leading up to a Presidential election.

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election: déjà vu All Over Again?

A 1900-2016 time series model predicts former Vice President Joe Biden will win 55.44 percent of the 2020 US presidential popular vote. A change in party control of the U.S. House of Representatives two years before a presidential election has a significant coefficient to explain the popular vote that has not been explored in the past 25 years. A cross-section 50 state Electoral College probit model projects President Trump’s reelection, winning 26 states with 279 electoral votes while Biden receives 259. These popular vote and electoral vote forecasts surely have wide discrepancies. Biden is forecast to win the Electoral College vote under several circumstances. If he wins Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes, which are predicted for Trump, the candidates could tie with 269 electoral votes and the House of Representatives would select the president. Biden would be elected if he wins Wisconsin and the popular vote in one Congressional district in Nebraska or both districts in Maine. Biden could win with victories in several states where he is forecast to lose close contests. Numbers of COVID-19 virus cases and deaths are not highly correlated with states where Trump is projected to win. The effects of factors such as the President’s health and candidates’ closing campaign behavior cannot be measured. Forecasting US presidential outcomes in the 21st century has become a highly risky activity.

The Political Economy Model: A Blue Wave Forecast For 2020

The Political Economy model represents one of the earliest political science forecasting models for presidential elections. It relies on a multiple regression equation with just a few predictor variables, drawing from leading theories of vote choice, measured several months before the election. Much has been said about the uniqueness of the 2020 election campaign, e.g., COVID-19, the extreme character of Trump’s rule, the dramatic economic collapse, widespread protests ignited by George Floyd’s killing, among other things. We do not deny these circumstances. However, we believe their effects are absorbed, then expressed, via the causal structure the model suggests. Here we apply the model to forecast the 2020 presidential election (popular and Electoral College votes), followed by forecasts for the House and Senate elections. We forecast a Democratic sweep.

An Inquiry of Bellwether Counties in US Presidential Elections

Bellwethers have been studied for decades in the realm of election forecasting. Presidential election forecasting has historically focused on the study of bellwethers at the level of the state, likely due to the fact that presidential candidates win electoral college votes based upon the winner of the popular vote in each state. However, states can be difficult to study due to their large sizes and diverse political environments, leading these authors to examine whether bellwethers can also be studied at the finer resolution of individual counties. To do so, the popular vote winner of each county for every presidential election from 1980 through 2016 was tabulated and mapped, yielding 19 true bellwether counties for the period. These counties were geographically clustered in the Midwest and in the Northeast. Demographically, the bellwether counties tended to be whiter, older, less educated, have lower median incomes, have a lower percentage of workers in the labor force, and have higher rates of vacant housing than the country as a whole. Finally, numerical bellwether scores for all 3142 counties in the US were computed based upon the number of elections in which each county voted for the winner of the election. Counties with the highest bellwether scores were also disproportionately found in the Midwest and in the Northeast.