Eligible Voters and Voter Turnout!

This is my analysis of the 2018 October 9th dataset provided by rfordatascience/tidytuesday (#tidytuesday).

The article related to this dataset can be found here:

http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-leads-nation-in-turnout/400763681/

All the following code for this exercise can be found at my github repo here:

https://github.com/jasonmstevensphd/Tidy_Tuesday_2018_28


Here we go!

Initial Exploration of the Dataset

Mapping it out

As the data were layed out by state I thought it would be interesting to plot a map. To get a sense of the data format I picked a random year (2012) and tried it out. First, there is “united states” listed in the state column. While this data are interesting it doesn’t help us for mapping data so that was filtered out as was “District of Columbia”. In order to make the scale more tangible the eligible voters were divided by 1 million.

Looking at Voter Turnout for NJ over Time

To make the example local I calculated the voter turnout for New Jersey over time. As is pretty clear from the graph the turnout is directly dependent on the type of election year it is. Also interesting, the number of eligible voters in increasing over time.

The Distribution of Voter Turnout for Midterms and Presidential Years

To get a better idea of how turnout in New Jersey varies I generated a density plot to show the distribution of turnout for both Presidential (Yellow) and Midterm (Green). What I found striking is that the best Midterm turnout never exceeded the lowest Presidential turnout. What say you 2018?