With all the ink that's been spilled over the question of how Michigan and Florida will be represented at the Democratic convention, and with a much-anticipated meeting of the Democratic rules committee at the end of this month to consider this question, I'm surprised that I haven't seen anywhere anyone trying to answer the following basic question:
If Michigan and Florida had voted when they were supposed to, and if both candidates had campaigned there, what would have been the result? Of course, the true answer to this question is an unknowable counterfactual. But, as you all know, economists answer such questions all the time, often on the basis of considerably less data than exists in this case. Since January, 48 states and DC have voted, and we know the result. We also have detailed demographic data on who voted, in the form of exit polls, for example, here: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/ We should also include a right-hand variable for time since Iowa. So we could run a multiple linear regression of the results against the demographic data and time. Let's say, as a first pass, that we do the following: ignore other candidates, make the left hand variable Obama's share of the Obama/ Clinton vote in terms of delegates, ignore the internal dynamics of delegate apportionment within the state, pretend that the demographics of the Florida and Michigan votes matched their demographics in the US Census (this last one should be straightforward to correct by estimating the demographics of the turnout first, but that would take another round of entering data from the census for each state.) This would be a great exercise for a college statistics class that e.g. uses Excel. It would take a little effort to enter the data into the spreadsheet, but if a class were working on it, they could easily divide up the task using e.g. a shared spreedsheet under Google Docs. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
