Changing Political Landscape
Even though this is the first project I plan to take up, I already feel the overwhelming need to shoot this blog in the metaphorical foot. This month, we’re going to be trying to talk politics. On the heels of the American midterm elections, it’s obvious that this kind of topic is on most people’s minds. Considering how the ‘Blue Wave’ was significantly different than the casual observer would expect, it is important to somewhat pick the minds of these voters and see their reasoning and other characteristics that lead them to vote as they do. So, we absolutely have to get our hands on some 2018 voting data! Personally, I’ve found that the CCES voting data is by far the best source to get data in a suitable format as to who each person in question voted for.
Ah, well it seems that we are unable to get the voting data for the date we want. However, we can still browse other datasets within the site and find the 2016 voting data. So, we plan on turning a small political topic into a complete and utter political minefield this week.
THE ISSUE
Regardless of how you find the 2016 election, its significance is undeniable. Any time a complete political outsider is elected to office, it should be taken as a significant dissatisfaction of the populace with the current political establishment. This, of course, can be positive or negative depending on where the populace is taking issue. Some on the left would suspect that a lot of this voting turnout was largely based upon demographic lines- i.e. white Christian males with lower education were more likely to vote for Trump than for Hillary Clinton. This is based on the demographic related policies that Trump espoused (being much less lenient to immigrants than previous politicians). However, others on the left may say that this election was solely based on economic insecurities citing a Midwest disenfranchised with the previous administrations. On the right, many believe that Trump is a return to good Christian values, a bright economic future and an America First attitude.
What we can see here almost immediately is that the left and the right believe somewhat similar things in terms of the election of Trump- they only disagree in the positive or negative implication of his policies. The largest disagreement is found in the following: is the election of Donald Trump an economic outcry, a fight of demographics, or something else? This should be the focus of our first project. As we are going to go in-depth with a very open question, we are going to do weekly updates on this dataset and where the data will lead us in regards to this question. So, the goal should be to have this dataset interpreted by the end of the month.
METHODOLOGY
In order to do this in a suitable time, we are going to have to:
Import and Clean the Dataset
Exploratory Data Analysis
Determine Plausible Models and/or Tests
Create and Validate Models and/or Tests
Write Final Report
The longest issue by far would be to take this .tab table and cleaning/modifying the dataset. I anticipate having this done by 11/17/2018.
Exploratory Data Analysis is another lengthy process as we are simply following the data, therefore this should be done by 11/23/2018.
Determining, Creating, and Validating Models and/or Tests should be rather quick and simple once we have had a good look at our data in Exploratory Data Analysis. Therefore, we should have this done by 11/26/2018.
The Final Report will take a lot of writing and compiling everything we’ve made, so it should be done by 11/30/2018.
Now that we have our dataset and our plan, we’ll get to working on finding out what we can about how people vote. I’ll be back at next Sunday with a detailed description of the dataset and what we’re going to have to be looking at. See you then!
Here’s the Data!