Where Women Matter Most In Election 2012

Excuse me while I play the cranky feminist for a minute, but I'm disheartened every time I sign into Facebook and see a list of female names I don't recognize.

Good-looking politicians are more likely to get elected than munters. This recent paper (pdf) by Andrew Leigh and Amy King found that, in the 2004 Australian House of Representatives elections, candidates who scored one standard deviation higher for looks won 1.5-2 percentage points more of the vote. This isn’t a quirk of Australian voters.

I'm pretty skeptical that the GOP's strategy to force Senate Democrats to take embarrassing votes on the reconciliation bill will mean much in the November elections. Most voters don't follow the minutiae of congressional procedure, but nor are they stone-cold idiots. An ad saying that "so-and-so voted against a bill to stop the government from covering Viagra for child molesters" isn't going to move many voters, though it may make whoever approved the message look bad.

The 11 states where women's votes matter most--and where candidates should spend their energy.

Here at Political Calculations, we occasionally generate some really interesting charts and data as we work on other projects behind the scenes. With that in mind, we've tapped the U.S. Census' income data going back to 1947 showing the average income earned by individual men and women in the U.S., and also the combined average income for all individual Americans.

Welcome to 2012! We're kicking off the new year by solving the biggest civil rights crisis in America today, at least according to the United States Department of Justice: the racial disparity in the percentage of individuals without current photo identification needed for voting in South Carolina! The editorialists of the Wall Street Journal were a bit taken aback by the apparent priorities of the U.S. DOJ: