Ohio Issue 3, 2009

I'm trying to make some sense of the votes for and against Issue 3, a constitutional amendment allowing for a single corporation to hold a monopoly on casinos in the state, and granting them the right to construct up to three total in four designated counties around the state. So far I'm not having a lot of luck. I don't have individual-level data to look at, yet, if ever, so I'm stuck with county-level data. This constrains interpretation to a great degree. Some very general things are notable:

1. Central Ohio voters were more likely than not opposed to the issue. Voters in Delaware and Franklin counties voted against the measure by roughly a 3-2 margin. Those in surrounding counties such as Pickaway, Madison, and Licking also opposed the amendment, albeit by a narrower margin.
2. Voters in and near cities in the Northeast and Southwest, i.e. Cleveland, Cincinnati, and environs, supported the measure.

Harkin says he has the votes

Harkin says he has the votes to pass public option bill in the Senate - The Hill's Blog Briefing Room

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http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/60739-public-option-fails-in-senate-committee

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/60739-public-option-fails-in-senate-committee

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How low can Obama's approval rating get and he still win re-election?

As long as he's at about 45% or above he should be OK.

Generic congressional ballot

Things are not looking good for the Democrats right now.

Ideology and Supreme Court confirmation votes

100 day job grades

In a poll conducted from April 23-26, 2009 by the Opinion Research Corporation (on behalf of CNN), respondents were asked a series of questions, many of which focused on grading the performance of President Obama and the 111th Congress, 100 days in. Unsurprisingly, there was a strong relationship between how a respondent graded Obama and how they graded the Democratic congressional delegation. Oddly, a not very strong relationship existed between how Obama and the Republican delegation were graded:

(for details on how this plot was created, see here.)

Gender and non-partisanship

Women are far more likely to be partisans than men. This surprises me, and I can't come up with a good, theoretically sound reason for it. It is well established that women lean disproportionally towards the Democratic Party and men towards the Republican Party, but it also seems as if women lean towards partisanship in general, at least when compared to men. Think of it this way - women are just as likely to be Republicans as men are, but they are far more likely to be Democrats than men. And this pattern is consistent regardless of age or income.

Figure 1. Probability of non-partisanship among men and women, by age group, 2006.

Source: Social Capital Community Survey, 2006

Figure 2. Probability of non-partisanship among men and women, by age group, 2006.

Source: Social Capital Community Survey, 2006

Gallup partisanship trends, 2004-present

Gallup regularly asks poll respondents their party identification. The graph above shows the trend in party id since, roughly, the beginning of 2004. There is a general trend away from the Republican party, but not necessarily to the Democrats. It's also interesting to note that the anti-GOP trend has stopped, and possibly reversed, since the November 2008 election.

The pale dots reflect specific poll results, the wiggly solid lines represent LOWESS-smoothed trends, and the dotted lines represent linear trend estimates based on bivariate OLS regression.