John Sides

Ron Paul is a hot search term in Iowa. Is this a sign of strong support, or that no one knows who he is?

Google search activity may or may not be predictive here, but this is interesting nonetheless: For virtually all of 2011, including the past month, there is more search activity about Ron Paul than any other candidate.  I thank John Coleman for highlighting this for me. What could this mean?  Maybe Ron Paul supporters just spend […]

Context is key in any analysis of voter demographics.

It only took 18 months.  Here’s a Wall Street Journal story.  Hat tip to David Fortunato.  Here’s his earlier post on the subject.

More from Andrew Reynolds: Yesterday on the Monkey Cage I predicted how parties would split the first 168 seats up for grabs in the Egyptian People’s Assembly. We now have preliminary results from the run-off races in all bar two of the 56 majority district seats being contested. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party […]

While the effective demise of other first-class correspondence has strengthened political mail so far, the broader obsolescence of the mail gives reason for long-term concerns. Campaigns have timed their mail programs under the assumption that voters check their mailboxes daily. This week’s announcement by the postal service that it would eliminate next-day delivery guarantees for […]

Dan Hopkins, Danny Hayes, and I will be contributing regularly to Behind the Numbers, the polling blog of the Washington Post.  The announcement is here.  We hope to be contributing discussion of new scholarly literature as well as our own analyses of polling data from the Post and others.  We thank Jon Cohen and the […]

Erik recently blogged about a new paper (pdf) by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz that used Google searches to measure racial prejudice in American media markets and found this: The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election. The Google methodology […]

The subject of my new post at 538 is whether retail politics—that is, presidential candidate travel to and appearances in crucial states—matters.  I also discuss whether local political outlets are inherently more favorable to candidates than national media.  Coincidentally, Jeff Zeleny’s new piece in the NY Times discusses the decline in certain kinds of retail […]