The county is awash in hundreds, if not thousands, of election analyses.

Be careful which you cling to. Many of the tools being employed are laden with problems and pitfalls and much of the data is subject to multiple interpretations.

For example, increasingly I see “analysts” trying to divine how segments of the population voted based on county and sometimes community returns which are regressed on, graphed against, or cross-tabulated by demographic data.

Statisticians have a name for trying to derive conclusions about individual behavior from group level data like county and precinct returns. It’s called the ecological fallacy. As you can tell from that second word, the method is fraught with analytic danger.

Simply put, you cannot assess how groups of individuals changed their voting behavior by looking at data from counties or even precincts unless the group in question makes up almost all of the county or precinct, or you employ some very complex and still controversial math that approximately none of these analysts are actually using.

That is, you can’t tell how Latinos, African Americans, Jews, non-college whites or any other segment changed their vote by looking at county or precinct data unless that group makes up almost the........

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