In election campaigns, voters essentially come in two varieties: “persuadables” and “committeds.” In general election campaigns, the vast majority of voters—the percentage depends largely on the type of election—are “committeds.” Campaign organizations often understand “committeds” as voters who will always vote for our candidate or never vote for our candidate. (This is based almost exclusively on which party the voter prefers.)

One might think “persuadables”—often called “independents” and “swing voters” (“swing” because they swing from one party to another between elections)—would be a larger percentage, based on the perception, perhaps, that voters don’t make up their minds till they’ve considered the candidates carefully. The reality is, in a general election, that most voters have pretty much ruled out one of the two candidates early on—they’d have a lot of trouble voting for the Republican or, conversely, the Democrat.

Simply speaking, campaign organizations look to persuade the “persuadables” and identify and motivate the “committeds” to come out and vote.

In this project, a class assignment from November 2022, I evaluated Presidential election data from the MIT Election Data Science Lab. I imagined myself a data analyst for some political group interested in identifying persuadable voters and persuading them to vote for a particular Presidential candidate in, say, the 2024 election. My task was to identify US counties where the group might have an impact.