Mike Axelrod writes:
I [Axelrod] am interested in building a model that predicts voting on the precinct level, using variables such as party registration, age, sex, income etc. Surely political scientists have worked on this problem.
I would be grateful for any reference you could provide in the way of articles and books.
My reply: Political scientists have worked on this problem, and it’s easy enough to imagine hierarchical models of the sort discussed in my book with Jennifer. I can picture what I would do if asked to forecast at the precinct level, for example to model exit polls. (In fact, I was briefly hired by the exit poll consortium in 2000 to do this, but then after I told them about hierarchical Bayes, they un-hired me!) But I don’t actually know of any literature on precinct-level forecasting. Perhaps one of you out there knows of some references?