Some Tools for Politicians – Researchers – Pundits

Word clouds tell you what people are saying about candidates:

You can see that tweets containing Hillary or Clinton and Bernie or Sanders have more words than tweets containing just Cruz or just Trump.  Tweets are centered on Indiana, which was just having their primary.  Each word cloud was based on 100 tweets.

You can use Box plots to provide visual information about a Data Set:

For example, You might find it is Useful to know How the different Mixes of Political Parties performed with respect to the Budget Deficit, using the Majority Party of the House and Senate and the Political Party of the President.

Bar graphs compare categories:

Comparing the different Tools governments use to Raise Money might be of interest to you for setting or evaluating policy on taxes.

Principal component plots show how numeric data clusters:

You can see from the plot that the parties of the Senate and House cluster together – Republican  Houses and Senates are similar and Democratic Houses and Senates are similar – and the  party of the President clusters with the Budget Deficit. You could find this information very useful.  These plots do not include the Obama years or the years of WWII.

Multiple correspondence plots show how categorical data clusters:

You can see that the House and Senate cluster together for both Republicans and Democrats while Democratic presidents cluster with small deficits than Republican presidents. This might be of interest for your campaign or analysis.

Log linear modeling allows comparisons between classes:

Expected Cell Counts Normalized to Percentages by Row
For the On Budget Deficit (-) (Surplus (+)) per GDP
by the Controlling Political Parties
of the Presidency, Senate, and House
Budget Deficit from 1947 to 2008Political Parties Lagged One Year
Rows Sum to 100 Except for Rounding

President	Senate	House	(-6.2,4]	(-4,-2]	(-2,0]	(0,4.2]
D	D	D	0%	30%	55%	15%
		R	–	–	–	–
	R	D	–	–	–	–
		R	0%	29%	42%	29%
R	D	D	33%	40%	21%	7%
		R	26%	42%	17%	15%
	R	D	33%	40%	21%	7%
		R	26%	42%	17%	15%

In the table, each row is the combination of the  Presidential, Senate, and House parties. You find in the rows the log linear modeled percentage of years in which the President, Senate, and House combination falls in each Budget Deficit class. The Party of the Senate does not affect the outcome and the Parties of the President and House do – Republican Houses do a bit better –  Democratic Presidents do much better – which might be of interest to you.

Odds ratios can be used to compare parties:

Iowa 2013 Legislature
Odds Legislator is Male

	House	Senate
Democrats	3 : 2	10 : 3
Republicans	16 : 2	10 : 2

You could be interested in the odds a legislator is a male, by party.
For both the House and Senate in Iowa, Democrats have lower odds of being male than Republicans. Depending on your political philosophy, this could be bad or good.