Columns

Schadenfreude - February 26, 2006

Stop the War - November 1, 2005

The Hypocracy of the ‘Anti-War’ Movement - January 5, 2005

Saddam Hussein Must Be Deposed - November 13, 2001

America Invited The Attacks Of September 11 - September 28, 2001

The U.S. Must Officially Recognize The Taliban - July 24, 2001

Open Letter To Paul Wellstone Regarding U.S. Involvement In Colombia - June 21, 2001

Presidential Election Data

During the summer of 2000, I became anxious about the coming presidential election. I didn’t know how it would turn out, and I wanted to find some way of making some basic predictions.

I figured that the best way to predict the future was to analyze the past, so I used Microsoft Excel to create a spreadsheet based upon voting data I found on Dav Leip’s excellent website ‘Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.’

Once I began to analyze the data, the project took on a life of its own. Two years and hundreds of man-hours later, I wound up with the document below.

There are two main sections of this spreadsheet. The first is a year-by-year breakdown of voting data, covering every election from 1832 to 2004. The analyses in this section should be fairly straightforward.

The second section is a state-by-state breakdown of the popular vote. Each state has two worksheets. The first contains a year-by-year statement of voting percentages, the second a graph of these percentages.

There are three other worksheets that I made just for the hell of it. One is a state-by-state comparison (with graph) of how Clinton did in ‘92, how he did in ‘96, and how Gore did in 2000.

The second is a somewhat complex series of formulae that are annotated in a way that probably only makes sense to me, but seek to compare Gore’s performance in 2000 with Kerry’s in 2004.

And the final page is a breakdown of the extent to which each state is a bellweather - that is, the number of times that the state gave its electoral votes to the man who eventually won the office.