Election Type Observatory

How did each presidential election change the American political landscape? V.O. Key, Jr. introduced the concept of the critical election (Key, 1955), while Angus Campbell and colleagues formalized the four-category typology — Maintaining, Deviating, Converting, Realigning — in Elections and the Political Order (Campbell, Converse, Miller & Stokes, 1966). We extend this framework by computing a quantitative classification scalar — the Contribution-Power-weighted mean absolute change in Partisanship Index — across 135 demographic groups and all 50 states, yielding a reproducible election-level classification. → Methodology