John Ray's personal blog.
Typical of a political operative in an even-numbered year, I’ve spent October wondering how much of the past year of my life has gone to waste. I recently completed a fairly substantial hand-written postcard experiment , in which I wrote 3,200 postcards to voters in Florida and Pennsylvania. The messages varied, but the basic construction of the postcards was similar: A paragraph of black text, an…
Democratic spam PACs don’t have enough to show for how annoying and bad for the party brand they are If you read this blog you get a lot of text messages from strangers who want your money. I’ve never texted you but on various social platforms I am often one of those strangers making asks of people who follow me. I maintain an active list or two of Democratic candidates and organizations I think…
This cycle, I designed a small postcard experiment that I outline here. In short, I wrote just over 3,200 postcards to low-turnout Republican voters living in very red areas in Pennsylvania and Florida, arguing that they should change their party affiliation and consider voting for Democrats in November. The four different arguments written on the postcards included highlighting the badness of…
Summer is upon us once again in Texas and the glorious nuisances of nature are in full bloom. The humidity has increased the insect population around the compost pile, a boon to worm and fruit fly alike, even distracting the squirrels and the neighborhood possum from sweeter fair just on the other side of the fence. The hydrangeas are growing unevenly in both height and shade, a peculiar strand of…
In the classic Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk (1979) , Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky report the results of several experiments consistent with a then-novel theory of how humans make decisions. They called their theory prospect theory , as it pertained to how peoples’ behavior changed depending on whether they were facing positive or negative future prospects. One of the…
Throughout the past couple of cycles, I have been tracking the electoral fortunes of “election deniers” up and down various elected offices in the United States. Despite evidence that election deniers systematically underperform at the ballot box, many continue to hold (and advance to higher) elected offices throughout the country, particularly in state legislatures. Resources such as The…
Have Democrats “overperformed” in special elections recently? If they have, how much confidence should we have that this overperformance heralds a strong result in November 2024? Some attempt to answer this by comparing recent special election results to Joe Biden’s performance within the same geography back in 2020. Here, I’ll take a simpler approach: I’ll look at how Democrats have been doing at…
This post is the first in a series about the state legislative races going on in 2024. I’ve put together a dataset on the roughly 7,400 state legislative incumbents in the country right now, 5,800 of whom will be on the November 5, 2024 general election ballot. Using a combination of state secretary of state websites, Wikipedia, and Ballotpedia, I’ve assembled data on the most recent elections…
I’m excited to show off my newest Shiny app, the Texas Precinct Explorer ! The app is designed to provide a large volume of Texas political data at your fingertips to advise your thinking about the state of Texas. It is available to anyone and is meant to help give campaigns a wealth of data to easily assemble and export at the push of a button. Getting started is very easy. All you have to do is…
Comparing the 2018 Senate race and the 2023 Issue 1 election suggest that, despite The Discourse, Sherrod Brown probably can’t and shouldn’t simply copy the “No on 1” playbook and, while its clear he holds the right position on abortion in Ohio, this is not the end-all, be-all of his path in 2024 On August 8, 2023, Ohio voted on the ballot measure State Issue 1 . The ballot measure would raise the…
I wear a lot of hats in my day to day. I’m a pollster . I use data to raise money for Democrats . I’m doing my best to foster a culture of activism here in Texas. I’m also a bit of a nut, who has fun doing things like writing hundreds of postcards and designing an experiment around them all in my spare time. I began my political career at about the same time as the “test everything” ethos began…
Welcome to 2023. Is this anything? Who knows. This isn’t too much of a post, but I need an excuse to get myself back into a little writing so I’m going to start off with an easy task: If I put together some plots I think are good enough to tweet, they’re good enough to keep on my blog. Seems reasonable, right? Lets look at some graphs! Here’s the historical context for electing new Speakers,…