1. Collecting and Analyzing the Municipality-level Results of the 2012 Presidential Election in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio
By Gregory Naigles
Introduction
The purpose of this project is to take a closer look at the election results for the states of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Frequently, when one analyzes elections results they do so at the county level, but I have long felt that municipality-level analysis is more effective at determining how certain groups vote and why. This is because a municipality's smaller aggregate unit size reveals more variability in election results than at the county level where such variability may be masked.
Discussion
These maps make clear that in all three states there is a strong urban/rural divide in terms of political geography. In all three states, the urban areas vote heavily Democratic, while the rural areas tend to vote Republican. While there are some rural areas that vote Democratic, particularly in New York, they are the exception. Figure 2 shows that while most of New York did not change dramatically from 2008 to 2012, much of Pennsylvania swung heavily toward the Republicans. An interesting pattern that I found was that in Pennsylvania, areas where bituminous coal is mined swung heavily toward the Republicans, while areas where anthracite is mined had a modest Democratic swing. Additionally, areas of eastern Ohio where coal is mined swung Republican much more than areas where coal is not mined. With regard to turnout, there is a strong correlation between high income levels and higher turnout. Middle- and outer-ring suburbs, particularly in Pennsylvania and Ohio, tended to see higher turnout in 2012 than in 2008, while in New York turnout declined everywhere, in part due to Hurricane Sandy.
Figure 1: Obama’s and Romney’s percentages of the vote in 2012
Figure 2: Change in Obama’s and Romney’s percentages of the vote from 2008 to 2012
Methods
For some states, collecting election results is as simple as going to the state Secretary of State’s website and downloading one file. However, the Secretaries of State of these three states do not compile election results for the whole state. Thus, to collect these results I had to contact each county individually. Some counties had the results on their websites, but for about 150 counties I ed them and requested the results. The results came back in all different types of forms, from Excel spreadsheets to PDFs to Word documents to Notepad files. Once I collected all the data and put them in a format that I could use, I used ArcGIS to create maps of the results, the change in the results from 2008, the change in turnout from 2008, and the turnout as a percentage of voting age population.
Figure 3: Percentage of Voting Age Population that voted in 2012
Figure 4: Percentage of 2008 votes that were cast in 2012
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Manny Gimond for his help at making these maps, as well as all the county elections officials who provided me with the results for their county.