Modeling the 2020 vote with Observable

I've been interested in how voter turnout might affect the 2020 US election and I've wanted to play with Observable notebooks.

So I blended the two projects, and you can play with my live Observable notebook that does those calculations.

The result is an admittedly super-simplistic model of how things might turn out. But you can increase the percentage of Republican and Democratic voters nationwide and see what happens!

Notably, even if Democrats were able to boost turnout more than Republicans — say 107% vs 106% — Trump still wins.

As written, it doesn't consider nuances such as regional differences in voting turnouts, swing voters, or faithless electors. (It does, however, account for the unique ways Maine and Nebraska divide their electoral votes). But I learned a lot in the process ... and there's more to come.

All my calculations are visible in the Observable notebook itself, and the initial data prep is documented in a Github repository. For good measure, I put all the raw data in my Datasette library.

Minneapolis race and ethnicity data by neighborhood, served with Datasette

Minneapolis police report stops and other incidents by neighborhood, so I decided to calculate the racial makeup of those neighborhoods to make some comparisons — along the lines of what I've already done for New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

This time, though, I'm using Datasette.

I've seen creator Simon Willison tweet about Datasette, and with some extra time on my hands I took a look. It's so impressive!

With Datasette, one can publish data online easily, efficiently (even free!) and in a way that allows others to explore the data themselves using SQL and feed data visualizations and apps. At scale.

How is this not in every newsroom?

(Simon, by the way, has offered to help any newsroom interested in using Datasette — an offer I hope to take him up on someday.)

Minneapolis neighborhoods

Once again, I've married US Census blocks with other municipal zones, this time the official neighborhood map of Minneapolis.

That data is now online, served up with Datasette.

And with some nifty SQL queries, bookmarked as simple links, I can list the race and ethnic makeup of every neighborhood by raw number.

Or by percentage.

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