I’m only aware of one other outlet that is projecting a Clinton loss tomorrow in Indiana. Though Bernie Sanders has scaled back spending in Indiana, Hillary has cut all spending from states that have yet to vote in the Democratic primaries, presumably to save funding for the general election campaign against Trump (edgy assumption, I know). This Clinton spending cut seems to be showing up in the Google Trends data for Indiana, as Bernie has seemed to have drastically increased his search interest relative to Hillary. Here are my estimates for what we will see tomorrow night:

Something about this projection doesn’t feel very right to me, though I suppose this concern is rooted in the surprisingly consistent polling results showing Hillary with a win. Despite this, every different configuration of my model, six total, is showing a Bernie win in Indiana. I have devoted quite a bit of time over this past week trying to see if it was possible to generate a different result, but it just wasn’t possible within my framework. Perhaps Hillary will win, and perhaps Hillary will lose, but regardless, I do think it will be very close.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular factor within all of my data that is significantly driving this result, though if I had to choose one I suppose it would be his slightly higher-than-average share of Facebook likes within the state, 78.5%, similar to Michigan (80.0%), Kansas (78.5%), Illinois (76.1%), and Missouri (76.9%). The Republican open primary that is being held tomorrow in Indiana will help Hillary by stealing independents that would’ve voted for Bernie, likely by around 0.4% (already factored into the above projection).

Michigan is perhaps the best analogue for Indiana. The Facebook data is very similar, and they are both open primaries. I believe that both have also had a minimal amount of early voting. One somewhat stark difference between the two states are the respective portions of the populations that are African American, with Michigan at 14.2% and Indiana at 9.4%, so Bernie should gain an advantage over Michigan in this respect. However, in Michigan, Bernie had a higher relative search interest measure (from Google Trends), about 14% higher. Bernie also had a higher number of individual campaign contributions in Michigan compared to Indiana; where he had about 1.56 times more <$200 contributions than Hillary in Michigan, and only 1.31 times more <$200 contributions in Indiana.

Thanks for the interest everyone, and happy voting to all you Hoosiers!

-Tyler

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