Note (3/14/22): This article was written prior to the release of the {workboots} package. Since the release of that package, I’ve discovered some errors with the methodology described here and would recommend instead referencing the post associated with the release.
While the sitting president’s party tends to House lose seats in the midterm elections, the president’s approval rating can help inform us of the magnitude of that loss. In general, the more unpopular the president, the more seats his party tends to lose.
In the year since I started this blog, there’s been a lot that’s happened: I learned to use R, picked up the basics of machine learning, and moved into a new job/industry.
The 2022 midterms are still quite a ways away, however, in order to have a forecast ready in time, I need to start working on the model well in advance!
Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! This year, my family drove down to Houston for the holiday & I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time. We played lots of games and ate well - my fridge is still stocked full of leftovers.
Are y’all ready for some charts?? This week, I did a bit of machine learning practice with the diamonds dataset. This dataset is interesting and good for practice for a few reasons:
A few weeks ago I had written about the VA Governor’s race before going on vacation - in that time it seems as though Terry McAuliffe’s campaign had lost a lot of steam and Youngkin made up a lot of ground in the final weeks of the campaign.
Rolling poll averages can be misleading in the absence of errorbars or an expected distribution of outcomes. FiveThirtyEight is currently tracking polls of Virginia’s Governor race slated for early November, and has kindly made their polls available to the public.
In my job, I spend a good amount of time working in the platform setup by our survey vendor, Qualtrics. There are some pre-formatted reports that we can send on a recurring basis through Qualtrics, but for one-off or custom reports, I can work with the raw data in R.
Wow, it’s been quite a while! Once again, I’m catching up from a long hiatus (this time, there was about a month’s gap between posts). Although I haven’t been writing here, I have been keeping myself incredibly busy - for that reason, I think I’m going to switch up the format of this site.