Cross-Endorsement Impact Study
Posting has been slow the last couple of days due to work on an political data research project I’ve been doing. One of the questions that came up in this project was how to weight votes cast for cross-endorsed candidates in determining a party’s “base” in a particular voting district.
Fortunately, a bit of research came my way, an essay by Scott Susin from 2004 that answers that question:
That the WFP had a larger effect on the race than the other minor parties is not surprising, since the WFP expended much more effort in the race than the other minor parties. [...] Less expected was the result that the WFP displaced so few Democratic votes, with each 100 WFP votes representing between 65 and 103 new votes for the candidate.
Short answer: don’t count ‘em.