Sunday, May 29, 2016

Salaries of Presidential Primary Voters by Candidate and State


The data used in this post comes from FiveThirtyEight and are put into easy to understand graphics. The first graphic shows the average salary of supports of each candidate by state. The states are ranked by highest average salary, Maryland, to the state with the lowest salary, Mississippi. The red line shows the average salary for each state. The first obvious conclusion is that John Kasich supporters make about $5-10 thousand more than supporters of other candidates. Second, in low salary states Clinton and Sanders supporter's have similar salaries, but when looking at higher salary states, Clinton supporters' salaries are even with Trump and Cruz supporters' salaries.


The following plot shows the distribution of average salaries for each Presidential Candidate. Again we see similar trends as before with Kasich having a high average income and Clinton having a mix of low and high income supporters.


The last plot shows the relationship between the average salary of a state and the average salary of a candidate's supporters. The red line is a perfect 1 to 1 ratio and the closer a candidate is to the red line the closer the candidate's supporters are to having the same salary as the average person of that state. The reason for almost all the dots falling above the line is because people with below average salaries are less likely to vote.


If you have any suggestions for plots using this data, please share in the comment section.


Note:

[1] All states are not included because all states have not held elections yet.

Hallway Mathlete Data Scientist

I am a PhD student in Industrial Engineering at Penn State University. I did my undergrad at Iowa State in Industrial Engineering and Economics. My academic website can be found here.