Vote Shift

The Vote Shift tab appears on the left sidebar, and is used to shift votes from one candidate to another. When adding a shift, a candidate, the strength of the shift, and the Vote Component to apply the shift to must be selected. The strength of the shift is the baseline percent of the electorate which is transferred from other candidates to the selected candidate (e.g., +10). Vote Components are subclassifications of the total votes which comprise the overall preset settings. For example, Vote Components may describe VoteHub’s ecological inferencing outputs by ethnicity and race for the midterms forecast. By filtering by a Vote Component, the vote shift will only apply to the voters which comprise that Vote Component. After the candidate, strength, and Vote Component are selected, the region where the shift applies must also be selected. The region can either be chosen via Select, which is the default setting, or Paint. In Select, features are selected on the map. The shift will only apply to those features, and no others. In Paint, features can be chosen to have the shift applied to by painting them with a brush on the map, accessible by holding the Shift key on the keyboard. The size and hardness of the brush can be modified. The shift will apply only to the features that were painted, and the intensity of the shift will be a fraction of the original strength of the shift assigned based on the strength of the paint. For example, a feature that had paint applied at 20% strength (20% opacity purple on the map) will only receive 20% of the shift. Shifts can also be filtered by variable attributes and characteristics, including demography, past election results, and economic conditions. This can either be a binary filter, which applies only if a characteristic exceeds or is less than a certain user-determined threshold, or a scaling factor, which applies the shift as a fraction of the original strength based on the value of the attribute relative to the rest of the geography. Vote Shifts can be enabled or disabled via the eye icon. The region and intensity of a shift can be viewed by the drop icon, and Vote Shifts can be deleted with the trash icon. All of these icons are to the right of the Vote Component selection drop-down.

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Examples

Vote Shift applying a uniform 5 percent shift towards Barry Moore from Everett Wess. Vote Shift applying a 5 percent shift towards Barry Moore from Everett Wess among White voters, only in counties where the White non-Hispanic population exceeds 50%. Vote Shift applying a shift towards Barry Moore from Everett Wess among White voters. The shift is scaled by the share of voters who are White non-Hispanic, where the maximum shift is 5 percent. Vote Shift utilizing map select which applies a uniform 5 percent shift towards Everett Wess from Barry Moore among all voters, only in the selected counties (Jefferson and Tuscaloosa). Vote Shift utilizing map paint which applies a shift towards Everett Wess from Barry Moore in Birmingham and its surrounding areas. The shift lessens in intensity further out from Jefferson County, and is scaled to a 5 percent shift.