Introduction
For this Geospatial Project I will be looking investigating the correlation between high er education and political party. I chose this topic to investigate because I read an article from The New York Times, as seen below, suggesting that there is a significantly higher number of Democrats with a four year degree, than those without one. This is something that I have seen to be true in my own family, but wanted to look into it further. I understand that education is extremely important in the world today because it increases your access to job opportunities, increases your earning potential, and often shows higher job satisfaction. I chose to focus on the state of North Carolina because it would be too impractical to find this information for the entire country and there are 100 counties which make it easier to analyze. I

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/us/politics/how-college-graduates-vote.html

2020 Election
To begin this investigation I first found a data set that had the results of the 2020 Presidential Election for each county in North Carolina from the North Carolina State Board of Elections database. I put the information into an Excel File and loaded it into Tableau to create my visualizations. Once I created the visualization, I published them to Tableau Public and embedded them into R Markdown to create the map below.

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From this visualization we can see that there is a majority of counties that voted Republican (red) and a few chunks and stand alone counties that voted Democrat (blue). There were a total of 21 counties that voted for the Democratic candidate in the 2020 election and 79 that voted for the Republican candidate. This is not too surprising considering that North Carolina was a red state in the 2020 election, but the results are significant because it was a swing state entering the election. Historically this follows the trend that North Carolina usually votes for the Republican candidate during the elections.

Bachelors Degree
I used the same process as before to create the visualization for the map below demonstrating the percentage of North Carolinians from ages 25-44 who have a Bachelors degree.


We can see that the map appears to have more lighter colored counties than darker colored ones. This means that the there are more counties with individuals (ages 25-44) without a Bachelors degree, than those with one. The legend also shows that the lowest percentage is 9.4% and the highest is 57.6% Which means that the county with the lowest number of individuals which a Bachelors degree is 9.4% and that there are no counties with a lower percentage than that, and that the county with the most individuals with a Bachelors degree is 57.6% and there are no counties higher than that. The average percentage of individuals with a Bachelors degree in North Carolina is 24% and there are oonly 30 counties that have a percentage equal to or greater than that percentage.

Conclusion
Given the information and visualizations from this investigation, I am not sure if there is a correlation between political affiliation and higher education. Overall there were 21 counties who voted for the Democratic candidate in the 2020 election and 29 counties who had an above average for the percentage of individuals (ages 25-44). Of those counties, 12 of them voted for the Democratic candidate and were above 24% for Bachelors degree. If we divide that number 12 by the number of counties who voted Democrat then we get 57% and if we divide it by the number of counties who had an above average Bachelors percentage, then we get 41%. I think that an argument could be made for the counties who voted Democrat given that 57% is in the majority, but the same argument could not be made about the percentage of that population with Bachelors degrees because 41% is in the minority.
From both maps we can see that there is a cluster of about four counties in the middle that voted Democrat in the 2020 election and had a higher percentage of individuals (ages 25-44) with a Bachelors degree. Those four counties are Wake, Durham, Orange, and Mecklenburg. Those counties were also the top four counties with the highest percentage of Bachelors degrees and in the top seven counties with the most votes for the Democratic candidate. This shows that some of the most educated counties tended to vote Democrat. However, the same argument could not be made for the counties that voted Democrat because of the nine counties in the northeastern cluster who voted Democrat (Bertice, Edgecombe, Halifax, Hertford, Pitt, Vance, Washington, and Warren) all but one had a below average percentage of Bachelors degrees. Therefore, if there was a higher majority of counties that had voted Democrat in the 2020 election and had an above average percentage of 25-44 year olds with a Bachelors degree, then we could prove the correlation. Since that is not the case, I do not think that this the case.

Limitations
There are certainly some limitations to this investigation. First, we could look into other factors that contribute to this topic such as income and high school graduation percentages. I think that a future investigation on this topic might be able to see if income is a factor. The reason that I did not focus on high school graduation rates was because not everyone can vote when they graduate high school and I wanted to see the overlap between those who voted in the 2020 election and the percentage of individuals with a bachelors degree. There are also many other factors that contribute to one’s political affiliation and ability to graduate with a four year degree that cannot be measured such as family history, study habits, motivation, mental health, and many others.