For my Geospatial Analysis I wanted to compare the results of the presidential election in 2016 to the results of the 2020 election for counties in Georgia. Georgia was one of the flipped states that allowed officials to call the election, which is why I chose to look at it.
My hypothesis is that several counties in Georgia will have flipped from being “red” counties to “blue” ones, since the overall state vote flipped from Republican to Democratic.
First, we will be looking at the results of the 2016 election. I downloaded the election data using a detailxls.zip file from the Georgia Election Results website: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/63991/184321/en/reports.html#
I went through the data to clean it. This spreadsheet split voting up by things like day-of and absentee votes, but for the purpose of my project I only needed to know the total number of votes for each candidate. Once I cleaned and organized that data, I loaded it into Tableau to create a voting map of Georgia. This interactive map includes voting details of each county: the number of votes for the democrat, republican, and libertarian candidate, as well as the total number of votes in each county. Counties where the republican candidate won are coded with the color red and counties where the democratic candidate won are coded with the color blue.
A similar method was used for the 2020 election. I downloaded the data from the Georgia Secretary of State website in the form of a Detail XLS: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/105369/web.264614/#/detail/5000. I cleaned the data in the same way to just have the total number of votes for each candidate. The maps color scheme is the same for the winner of each party.
Next, I wanted to compare the two election maps side by side with each other to visually see if there were any differences or flipped states.
What was surprising to see was that only one county, Burke, flipped from 2016 to 2020, and it flipped from Democratic to Republican, despite the entire state of Georgia flipping from Republican to Democratic. Because there was minimal change among counties as a whole, I decided to look at the increase of votes as well.
First I looked at the total increase in votes in each county between the two elections.
Only one county, Stewart, had less voting in 2020 than it did in 2016, which prompted me to look at the change between Republican and Democrat voters in each county.
As we can see from the two maps, Stewart County lost both Democrat and Republican votes from 2016 to 2020. Rockdale also lost Republican votes between the two elections. It is also important to note the differing scales on each of these graphs. The scale on the Democratic change graph goes all the way up to 85k while the one for Republican change only goes up to 20k. We can see from the graphs that Democrats had a much stronger increase in votes from 2016 to 2020 than Republicans did, explaining the flip that Georgia experienced.