Did 4 out of 10 Kentucky Democrats vote for Mitch McConnell last year?

[n2doc]

If you're a Kentucky Democratic Party official still reeling from the results of last year's U.S. Senate race, you might want to look away.

Forty-three percent of Democrats who voted pulled the lever for Mitch McConnell last year, according to an analysis done by the U.S. Senate majority leader's longtime pollster, Jan van LoHuisen. In some counties, that number was close to 70 percent.

McConnell's analysis of voting trends gives him a much larger advantage among Democrats than did exit polling conducted last November, which showed 19 percent of Democrats voted for the Republican incumbent instead of his Democratic challenger, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.

McConnell's team, looking at voting data posted by the Secretary of State's office, drew their conclusions using a method called ecological inference — the process of using patterns in aggregate data to make inferences about individual-level actions. Van LoHuisen said he relied on statistical procedures and software designed by Harvard professor Gary King to enhance the accuracy of ecological inference.


Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/04/03/3782981_sam-youngman-did-4-out-of-10-kentucky.html