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ID: 134794

Election fundamentals and polls favor the republicans / Highton, Benjamin; McGhee, Eric; Sides, John

Sides, John	Article
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Summary/Abstract

Our congressional forecasting model provides predictions of individual House and Senate races as well as aggregate party seat shares in each chamber. It does so by marrying an underlying structural or “fundamentals”-based model with available polling data—an approach similar to Linzer (2013). The structural portion of the model is based on contested House and Senate elections from 1980 to 2012, excluding those when an independent or third-party candidate won a significant share of the vote. 1 The dependent variable is the Democratic candidate’s share of the major-party vote. The independent variables are drawn from the extensive literature that has identified significant national and state or district correlates of congressional election outcomes (e.g., Jacobson 2012). These include:

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ID: 110630

Prejudice rivals partisanship and ideology when explaining the / Highton, Benjamin

Highton, Benjamin	Journal Article
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2011.

Summary/Abstract

This article demonstrates that racial prejudice was strongly related to the state-level nonblack vote in the 2008 presidential election, which featured the first African American candidate from a major party, Barack Obama. Additional tests show that while prejudice also explains shifts in the nonblack vote between 2004 and 2008, its influence on voting in the 2000 and 2004 elections was modest at best. Furthermore, there is no relationship between racial attitudes and state-level presidential approval of George Bush in 2008. Taken together, the findings suggest that prejudice does not have a pervasive influence on political behavior and opinion. Instead, the effect appears to have been triggered by the presence of Barack Obama on the ballot. Had there been less prejudice among the American voting public, Obama would likely have won an electoral vote landslide.

Key Words

Ideology ; America ; George Bush ; Barack Obama ; Presidential Election - 2008 ; Rivals Partisanship

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