Voter Perceptions

This website provides information about the Voter Perception data created in Hassell, Heseltine and Reuning (2025) and then further expanded here. The scores here are estimates of voter perceptions of politician ideology. Unlike other measures these scores use survey data, but adjust them to account for the fact that voters differ in their own internal understanding of liberal and conservative. In addition the scores are dynamically estimated so that you can track how a politician moves overtime.

Below shows the perceived ideology of all candidates in a given state and year by election. In some instances candidates are missing because of difficulties labeling and changes in who is included, see the FAQ for details. There are also visualizations showing overtime changes and how legislative and perception ideology relate.

This data is based on C/CES survey data. The actual data is available at the Harvard Dataverse, along with a crosswalk that connects the perception scores to DIME, Nominate and 538 Election data. In order to help anyone interested in the data the site includes an (overly) detailed explanation of the methodology used.

Estimates

Plot.plot({
  className: "plot",
  color: {
    legend: true,
    domain: ["Democratic", "Other", "Republican"],
    range: ["#083a90", "#06be37", "#e81b23"]
  },
  x: {
    domain: [-4, 4]
  },
  y: {
      label: null,
      domain: d3.groupSort(
        datafiltered,
        ([d]) => d.Order,
        (d) => d.Seat
      )
  },
  height: 1000,
  marks: [
    Plot.axisX({
      label: "Conservative", 
      labelAnchor: "right"}),  
    Plot.axisX({
      label: "Voter Perceptions", 
      labelAnchor: "center", 
      labelArrow: false}),
    Plot.axisX({
      label: "Liberal", 
      labelArrow: "left",
      labelAnchor: "left"}),  
    Plot.dot(datafiltered, {x: "Ideology", y: "Seat", stroke: "Party", tip:true,   channels: {Name: "Candidate", Party: "Party", Ideology: "Ideology"},}),
    Plot.link(datafiltered, {y: "Seat", x1: "Lower", x2: "Upper", stroke: "Party"})
  ]
})

viewof selection = Inputs.form(
  {
    state: Object.assign(Inputs.select(
    data.map((d) => d.State),
    {sort: true, unique: true, label: "State", multiple: true, value: ["California"]}), {style: '--label-width: 50px'}), 

    year: Object.assign(Inputs.select(
    ["2006","2008","2010","2012","2014","2016","2018","2020","2022"],
    {sort: true, unique: true, label: "Year",   multiple: true, value: ["2020"]}) , {style: '--label-width: 50px'}),
  },
  {
    template: (formParts) => htl.html`
     <div>
       <div style="
         width: 600px;
         display: flex
       ">
         ${Object.values(formParts)}
       </div>
     </div>`
  }
)

data = FileAttachment("/generate/out/campaign_data.csv").csv({ typed: true })
datafiltered = data.filter((d, i) => selection.state.includes(d.State) && selection.year.includes(String(d.Year)))