**** Elections thread *****

[Poopadoop]

I'm referring to the change in the D candidates themselves. Lamb is a vastly different D than the 2016 "D" in the sample. Is that heteroskedastic?

Your argument is that, in PA, something besides Trump being president changed between 2016 and 2017 that resulted in the D swing. That's got nothing to do with heteroscedascity. Even if it were possible for one predictor and one outcome varaible to result in heteroscedascity (it isn't), the binomial analysis doesn't assume homoscedascity, so it's not relevant. If it were an ANOVA then that assumption would have to be upheld.

My response to your argument is that explanation only works in PA, it can't explain the other five data points.

Are you suggesting that your model reliably approximates the truth?

I'm suggesting in the absence of a more compelling explanation it does pretty good, yes. For each election, it's obvious that different things are going to factor into what happens. We can't quantify what those things are or how they affect the swings. Certainly Conor's a different candidate than the last guy and that makes a difference. But it only makes a difference in PA, and we don't know how much of a difference it made. Further, all kinds of other things will have effects as well, because lots of things change between 2016 and 2017, not just the candidates in those special elections. Without any systematic reason to think those changes all favoured D candidates, then the appropriate assumption is that the effects of those unknown variables would tend to self-correct, i.e., cancel each other out.

The one common denominator in all these special elections is that they took place since Trump was elected. So that is one variable that arguably should impact all their outcomes. Further a change in the PA S.E should not affect the five special elections other states, and certainly not when those elections occurred BEFORE the one yesterday. So to exclude Trump as a cause, you need to go through each S.E. and make separate arguments for why each of those had the swing it had. Maybe you can do that convincingly, I don't know. But until someone does, I'm holding the simplest, one variable explanation as my model.