Skip to main content



Clusters Preventing Spread of Hillary Clinton’s Influence to More States

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/clinton-probably-cant-expand-the-2016-map-and-if-she-does-it-wont-matter/

FiveThirtyEight is a news site that bases all of their articles and discussions on statistics. This article discusses the merits of the Hillary Clinton political agenda for the 2016 elections. Her goal, to have more success as a democrat than in the 2014 midterm elections, is to spread her influence to several states that would either lean democrat or could potentially swung. In this case, the states that she wants to target are first Arkansas, Missouri, and Indiana, as they all have significant working-class populations that Clinton wants to target. In addition, Clinton would then target Georgia and Arizona as they could appear to be poised to start leaning more towards Democrats.

Arkansas, Missouri, and Indiana voted at about the view of the nation in 2008, however since then, have drastically flipped sides, and are significantly leaning Republican. Arizona and Georgia have always been republican, and even though the population has become more diverse, it is clear by the make up of the individual legislatures of these states that they are definitely very republican. These trends can be seen in the following graph.

enten-datalab-clintonmap

However, there is a more theoretical reason why Clinton will not win these states, and that is the idea of diffusion of innovation, or in this case ideas. We can probably make a threshold based off of the percent of democrats in the state legislatures as a measure of the density of clusters. All of the states that Clinton is targeting is 60%-dense with the existing Republican ideology. This density would be too high such the threshold for her winning the state, which may be some q that is unknown exactly, but 60% is greater than 1-q in the sense of this article. At a higher level, these states can be viewed as clusters that a new ideology would have to spread too, but are too dense that the nodes in those clusters will not change.

The article also briefly brings up an interesting point that is related to direct benefits, and that is in the case that the states do vote for Hillary Clinton. In these cases, the author said that the votes would not matter, and that the election would have already been won by Clinton. In this case, since citizens already would know the voting of the country and the results, if Hillary were to win, they would not vote Republican. This comes from the benefits of being on the winning side, or in the other case, Republicans not voting because there is no value in voting if a result is already determined. In these cases, the states could end up voting for Clinton, but otherwise, based off clusters, Clinton will not be able to reach those states, according to the article.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

November 2014
M T W T F S S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Archives