PULSE 2.0
/Learn · Layer 1 — What's actually in this data?
ANES (the American National Election Studies) has been asking
Americans the same kinds of questions since 1948 — who they voted
for, what they think about the issues of the day, and basic facts
about who they are.
It's run by a partnership of university researchers (long based at the University of Michigan, with Stanford as a longtime co-sponsor), funded mainly through the National Science Foundation — not by a campaign, a news network, or any political party. Around every presidential election, ANES interviews a nationally representative sample of Americans twice: once before the election, asking what they're thinking going in, and once after, asking how they actually voted and why. Interviews have been conducted in person, by phone, and increasingly online as the decades have passed.
Before looking at any numbers, let's get to know what one of these questions actually looks like: the exact wording, the choices a respondent could pick, and what happens when someone doesn't want to answer.
Pick a topic below to walk through it.
It's run by a partnership of university researchers (long based at the University of Michigan, with Stanford as a longtime co-sponsor), funded mainly through the National Science Foundation — not by a campaign, a news network, or any political party. Around every presidential election, ANES interviews a nationally representative sample of Americans twice: once before the election, asking what they're thinking going in, and once after, asking how they actually voted and why. Interviews have been conducted in person, by phone, and increasingly online as the decades have passed.
Before looking at any numbers, let's get to know what one of these questions actually looks like: the exact wording, the choices a respondent could pick, and what happens when someone doesn't want to answer.
Pick a topic below to walk through it.
Where this data actually comes from:
every variable on this site (the "VCF" codes you'll see, like
VCF0101) comes from ANES's Time Series Cumulative Data File —
"VCF" is literally short for that. This file is archived and
distributed by ICPSR (the Inter-university Consortium for
Political and Social Research, based at the University of Michigan),
which also publishes the official codebook documenting every
question's exact wording, valid answer codes, and missing-data
conventions — the same source this site's question text and labels
are drawn from. The current official release is also available
directly from ANES at electionstudies.org. If you ever want to go
straight to the original source instead of this site's walkthrough
of it, that's where to look.
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