CORY McCARTAN

  • Redistricting
  • Writing
  • CV

Posts

Crossing the Continent by Train, Twice

Pictures from a near-circumnavigation of the United States.

August 25, 2021
Suppose—hypothetically—that you find yourself one evening, early in the second summer of our pandemic, reading your email, when you open up an advertisement for discounted train tickets.

Union Local Size

Big unions’ sizes are driven by a couple large locals

May 2, 2021
Some unions have relatively even local memberships, others have huge disparities in size between their largest and smallest locals. Why? And can we measure it?

Northern Irish Parliamentary Constituencies

How sectarian divisions translate to "independent and impartial" constituency boundaries

February 28, 2021
In a place where religious polarization is stronger than political polarization (though they are intertwined), how does the redistricting process look? Are the boundaries fair? Random simulations can provide an answer.

Conditional Forecasts

Explore scenarios and track each candidate's chances of claiming the presidency, depending on which states they win—and by how much.

November 3, 2020
Use this tool to game out various scenarios, or to make real-time election-night forecasts for the presidential race as the results roll in.

The Candidates are Rallying Their Bases

Facebook ad spending reveals campaigns’ focus on fundraising over persuasion.

May 9, 2020
Last week, Biden outspent Trump on Facebook by more than a 2-to-1 margin. But per-state spending has little to do with how competitive each state is, and everything to do with how many supportive voters live there.

Not Just Like the Flu

Right now, chances are that someone you know will die of COVID-19.

March 22, 2020
All of the numbers floating around about the coronavirus can obscure the one simple fact that we must all remember if we are to be disciplined enough in our social distancing: this pandemic is deadly serious, and if we don’t continue to take drastic action, at an individual and societal level, then someone you know will probably die.

The Other March Madness

Why we should never have to change our clocks again.

March 7, 2020
Should this be the last daylight savings? The time zone shift is an excellent opportunity to look at daylight patterns across the country.

The Nevada Caucuses

What the realignment phase can tell us about voters’ preferences.

February 23, 2020
Caucuses have a distinct advantage over primaries, which are conducted by ballot: after an initial tally of candidates’ support, voters can realign themselves into new groups before the final count. This realignment process can provide valuable insight into the preferences of voters, and help us understand how the race might change if more candidates start to drop out.

On a Streak?

Why your city’s weather changes, or doesn’t.

February 18, 2020
Streaks are an important part of how we experience a place’s weather: it matters not just how hot it gets, or how much it rains, but also how long these kinds of weather stick around. Mathematically, one way to understand these patterns is through Markov chains. Thinking of weather in this way can reveal some interesting patterns, and confirm some stereotypes.

The Geography of Political Differences

How political views and polarization vary across states.

February 14, 2020
While we’re all familiar with the usual red-blue map of state partisan preference, things get a little more interesting when we look at states’ views on economic and social issues separately.

The Continental Divide

Elevation profiles of U.S. states

December 29, 2019

The standard U.S. map shows states laid out in two dimensions, but doesn’t convey any information about the crucial third dimension: altitude.

37 Supreme Court Justices on a Plane

Two-dimensional ideal points using multidimensional scaling

October 26, 2017

The most common measure of Supreme Court justice ideology are the Martin–Quinn scores, developed by the eponymous political scientists. Since their original publication in 2002, the scores have been widely used, in political science and in the media, to place justices on a left–right political spectrum.

Swirling Fractals

An animated Julia-set journey

April 1, 2015
Corresponding to each point in and around the Mandelbrot set is a Julia set. If we start with a point near the origin, and move it in a circle around the main bulb of the Mandelbrot set, the series of corresponding Julia sets morph beautifully into one another.
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