elections for U.S. President, 1932-2008, by state

Description

Data from states and the District of Columbia, Democratic share of the presidential vote, 1932-2008.

Usage

data(presidentialElections)

Format

• statename of state, character

• demVotepercent of the vote for president won by the Democratic candidate

• yearnumeric, integer

• southlogical, TRUE if state is one of the 11 states of the former Confederacy

Note

996 observations, unbalanced panel data: (a) Hawaii and Alaska contribute data from 1960 onwards; (b) the District of Columbia contributes data from 1964 onward; (c) Alabama has missing data for 1948 and 1964.

Source

David Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections http://uselectionsatlas.org

Examples

data(presidentialElections)
library(lattice)
xyplot(demVote ~ year | state,
       panel=panel.lines,
       ylab="Democratic Vote for President (percent)",
       xlab="Year",
       data=presidentialElections,
       scales=list(y=list(cex=.6),x=list(cex=.35)),
       strip=strip.custom(par.strip.text=list(cex=.6)))

## Obama vs Kerry, except DC
y08 <- presidentialElections$year==2008
y04 <- presidentialElections$year==2004
tmpData <- merge(y=presidentialElections[y08,],
	         x=presidentialElections[y04,],
                 by="state")
tmpData <- tmpData[tmpData$state!="DC",]
xlim <- range(tmpData$demVote.x,tmpData$demVote.y)
col <- rep("black",dim(tmpData)[1])
col[tmpData$south.x] <- "red"

plot(demVote.y ~ demVote.x,
     xlab="Kerry Vote Share, 2004 (percent)",
     ylab="Obama Vote Share, 2008 (percent)",
     xlim=xlim,
     ylim=xlim,
     type="n",
     las=1,
     data=tmpData)
abline(0,1,lwd=2,col=gray(.65))
ols <- lm(demVote.y ~ demVote.x,
          data=tmpData)
abline(ols,lwd=2)	

text(tmpData$demVote.x,
     tmpData$demVote.y,
     tmpData$state,
     col=col,
     cex=.65)
legend(x="topleft",
       bty="n",
       lwd=c(2,2),
       col=c(gray(.65),"black"),
       legend=c("No Change from 2004","Regression"))
legend(x="bottomright",
       bty="n",
       text.col=c("red","black"),
       legend=c("South","Non-South"))