3 thoughts on “Incumbency advantage in 2010

  1. I looked at this quickly, and then I realized that I really needed a second horizontal line at 50% vote in 2010. That would tell me at a glance which seats were retained by the same party and which changed hands, making the whole thing much easier to interpret.

  2. A simple enough graph for me to test my infantile visual statistics intuition.

    A neat line from bottom left to top right means exactly replicated republican performance in 2010, right?

    It looks like the mass of black and red dots are both above that neat line, so Republicans did a bit better in 2010.

    The red dots seem scattered on either side of the black dots and mixed in with them, so I'd intuit that to mean there's not a strong, easily discernable change in incumbancy effect for Republican candidates in 2010 vs. 2008.

    As I look at it more I'm confusing myself (overthinking "vote share" and the graph set-up) so now I'll go read the article.

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