Cory McCartan
Asst. Prof. of Statistics & Political Science at Penn State. I study stats methods, gerrymandering, & elections. Bayesian. Founder of UGSDW and proud alum of HGSU-UAW L. 5118.
corymccartan.com
- 2nd chart is interesting - swing was not correlated with turnout. Consistent with a mostly persuasion effect
- Blue wave watch: Democrat flips Trump +17 Texas Senate seat in 32-point swing www.gelliottmorris.com/p/blue-wave-...
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- Reposted by Cory McCartanThe administration is boxed into a corner right now and its entirely the result of the incredible discipline of the people in the streets. The Insurrection Act angle was always predicated on ICE brawling with the black bloc in street. Without that, it's worthless.
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- Reposted by Cory McCartan“Everyone should be allowed to carry a gun for their safety but the government can murder you in the street if you have a gun” is an incredible endpoint for the conservative moment
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- Reposted by Cory McCartanI am trying not to post on these events in this state of mind but: I hope people understand what the observers are doing is brave and dangerous.
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- Good to see another aggregation of public poll results, but I wouldn't describe these averages as transparent at all! The methodology page doesn't share any details about how weights are determined or how they are "empirically grounded." Cf the methodology at fiftyplusone.news/methodology
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- Reposted by Cory McCartan#SCOTUS is likely to do the right thing in the Lisa Cook case. But it's worth bearing in mind that this idea that the Fed is some bespoke exception to the unitary executive theory is utterly incoherent as a matter of both law and history—and is really just proof that the UET is itself bollocks:
- Last fall I shared new methods research with @shirokuriwaki.bsky.social on ecological inference—inferring individual relationships from aggregate data. Our new review WP frames past EI methods as linear models, and argues credible EI requires controlling for covariates arxiv.org/abs/2601.07668
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- Incredible research and really good summary thread. Hopefully we can take more intentional steps to foster success for FGLI students in the academy
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- Reposted by Cory McCartanStudy after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:
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- Reposted by Cory McCartanThis is an impressive project. My reaction to what it shows though is that survey experiments have gotten out of hand in polisci. I will blog more on this, but I do not think survey experiments are emblematic of the credibility revolution. Some are already interpreting as such, which is a problem.
- New paper! @william-dinneen.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social Yiqing Xu and I use GPT to code 91k articles from 174 polisci journals (2003–2023)and track research designs, transparency practices, and citations. How has the credibility revolution reshaped the discipline? doi.org/10.31235/osf... 🧵
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- Interestingly, the TX gerrymander doesn't have any net impact in a D+12 environment Plots below show new effect of redistricting this cycle—cf left with the changes vs right if the 3-judge ruling holds
- Davidson/Nashville swinging D+25 is wild Most swing districts next year won't look the way TN-07 does, with mainly rural counties that are shifting D by less
- D+10-15 national environment would mean Dems end up ~100 seats over Rs in the House tinyurl.com/cmchousemodel
- Only early vote so far (see www.elections.tn.gov/county-break...) and unclear how/if this model handles vote method, but notably Montgomery county is only D+3 in the early vote. My feeling is it would take combo of massive turnout in Nashville + e-day overperformance district-wide for Behn to win
- Reposted by Cory McCartanNew paper in press at JPSP! An adversarial collaboration focusing on a large-scale test of how strongly implicit racial attitudes predict discriminatory behavior. Pre-print here: osf.io/preprints/ps...
- The guy they interview was also on Trump's data team! No hard questions asked about how "independent" this effort is
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- Interesting to think about the mechanism here Poetic language evidently signals that the preceding system prompt should be interpreted in a different, less literal, context. One could imagine learning the direction in model-space that leads to this reframing, and optimizing prompts to get there
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- IF it holds, this would net Dems 1.6 seats, on average, due to mid-decade redistricting (D+1 seat in a Dem-favoring environment)
- BREAKING: A three-judge court blocks Texas from using the congressional map passed by its Republican-controlled legislature in August for the 2026 midterms as part of the gerrymandering fight sparked by President Trump. An appeal to the Supreme Court is expected www.courtlistener.com/docket/60654...
- D+8.5 (±2) would be 245 Dem seats on average
- Have updated my simple House model spreadsheet with currently enacted districting plans. Net effect is R+0.4 seats on average (!), with actually a _Dem_ advantage past a D+8 national environment. Copy, edit, & explore for yourself: tinyurl.com/cmchousemodel
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- This is such great news!
- Reposted by Cory McCartanIf you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university. You’re working at a state propaganda factory.
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- Where is the 27th amendment when you need it
- Look at this new outrage. To open govt, we're retroactively letting 8 Senators sue for $500K each over having had their J6 phone toll records looked at. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/u...
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- NYC precinct map: Mamdani now vs the primary Purple = relative improvement vs primary Orange = relative loss vs primary (e.g. GOP voters) Takeaway? Mamdani improved significantly with Black voters since June! We see this in EI estimates as well: Mamdani likely won Black voters ~ 52/43 vs Cuomo
- Precinct-level NYC data: Mamdani exceeded our voterfile-based expectations, Cuomo slightly exceeded them; Sliwa fell way behind, especially in places he was expected to do well!
- In VA Gov precinct data, we are seeing a ~6pp shift on Spanberger vote share (y axis) versus 2024 president (x axis). Bit smaller in GOP precincts and bit larger in Dem precincts cf an R+5.5 shift (on vote share) from Biden '20 to McAullife in '21
- Here at the CBS News data desk with @chriskenny.bsky.social and @simko.bsky.social! Looking at the VA numbers
- This election night I will be working the Data Desk at CBS News, focusing on the NYC mayoral race! Will try to post some things we are seeing in our precinct-level data and analyses, and maybe some cool maps like this one of Mamdani vs Harris support
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- Very important point in the WAR debate, but I think the radical centrists take their argument farther: they think the whole party's fortune can be shifted by moderating! When in fact voters judge moderates relative to the party line. Major fallacy of composition IMO
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- A few weeks ago I shared a new WP on doing ecological inference—learning individual relationships from aggregate data, such as vote choice by race from precinct data. Excited now to introduce `seine`, our open-source R package for doing EI easily and efficiently! corymccartan.com/seine/
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