The FEC is currently down to 3 of 6 commissioners. I've collected as many FEC votes as possible + scaled them. The data back up that Lindenbaum is pretty moderate in historical terms. Two others (Trainor, Broussard) are more polarized. Trump (illegally) fired Weintraub, who was left-most Dem.

R-squared for the models.

Maine Senate since 1954. Graph summarizes town-level regressions by cycle, controlling for partisan enrollment, population, and county effects. Not much to see pre-2020, but high Dem towns in 2020 bolted at a larger rate from Collins. Dem voters are ready. Can the pty take adv? Model fit below.

Maine has a close relationship w/Canada, and I'm working on measuring French-Canadian influence in Maine politics. Here are county-level ranks using available Census data back to 1910. Same four counties have historically had the most French ancestry. (Measuring this is not easy!)

Congrats to Bowdoin Women’s basketball for their NESCAC Championship. Packed gym. Epic comeback! An “instant classic”!

Interested in evidence of polarization in Maine? The graph looks at just enrolled Dems and Reps by year and cong dist (using current CD boundaries). Since about 2008, CD1 has become more Dem and CD2 has become more Rep. Not a surprise, perhaps, except that the chg is very recent.

And because Bowdoin is in Brunswick, here is the change there:

Working on a project measuring party registration in Maine towns back to 1954. Here is the statewide % of registered Dems (looking only at Dems and Republicans). Big change from 1954 to late 1970s. (Been fun collaborating w/ Dave Emery and Chris Potholm).

I love tracking House & Senate forecasts. Thanks to Inside Elections (& @rubashkin.bsky.social) for keeping their regular House & Senate ratings open to see. Here is how Sen election ratings changed over 2024. Lots of stability, though TX moved in Dem direction. Select House races in comments.

Here's the same graph, but for Trump. His actual approval was flat, but at various points he was more or less popular than the model expected.

Lots of talk abt the election outcome & its alignment w/certain fundamentals...i.e., "Biden is unpopular and so GOP should clearly benefit." Yes, but some of these fundamentals are themselves out of alignment w/known economic & political factors.

mikemfranz.com/2024/11/14/t...

And here are the Senate results

Lots of chatter this year (as usual) about the efficacy of election forecasting models. This past summer, Andy Robinson (Bowdoin Class of '27) and I collected pre-election House and Senate ratings and compared them to the outcome. Here are the House results. Humans do a decent job.

Great piece from @smotus.bsky.social. To reinforce some of this, here are correlations of the GOP prez vote across elections at the county-level (using diff starting points). The corr. of the county-level vote b/w '76 and '20 is nearly 0. Things most often change slowly, but do change.