The Louisiana Data Project: Officeholders and Candidate Turnout in the Bayou State
By: Jim Cupples
My name is Jim Cupples and I work on the Run For Office database from NationBuilder, which allows users to enter their address and see elected positions and find out how to get on the ballot. The main idea behind building Run For Office is to lower the barriers to leadership so that leadership opportunities would be open to more people.
This past summer, armed with a treasure trove of officeholder data, I teamed up with some colleagues to take a deep analytical dive on elected officials in the state of Louisiana — aiming to find out who the roughly four thousand publicly elected officeholders are, and how their demographics relate to the rest of the state. We also looked at the issue of “Candidate Turnout” in Louisiana so that we could better understand the demographics of the candidates that the people of Louisiana choose from, and where Louisianans might need more candidates. It was incredibly gratifying for me, as I was able to work with some smart and dedicated people, as well as hopefully provide some valuable insights for where the imbalances in elected leadership exist and what can potentially be done about it.
A few things had to happen for this collaboration to take place.
First, I had to become more active participant in the Data For Democracy community. I had been in the Data For Democracy community for over a year, but mostly as an observer, hanging around the Slack channel. Jumping in turned out to be a incredibly lucky step, both professionally and personally.
Secondly, I needed an opportunity to pause, analyze and reflect on the data we had collected. The timing was right to do exactly that, because we at Run For Office had just finished the data collection process for all county offices in the United States and were pivoting the work of our crowdsourcing app toward municipalities. Whenever we change levels of government for research there is some corresponding engineering work on the front and back end, which creates a natural pause.
Third, and pivotally, we needed great data to work with. Fortunately, I knew that the state of Louisiana has rich and thoroughly maintained election data to pull from. As you can see from the report, we created a comprehensive study of all officeholders in the state of Louisiana, as well as the 2016 and 2014 election cycles.
I feel like we only scratched the surface of what we wanted to learn, but my colleagues and I ( Charlotte McClintock [only a 3rd year student at the University of Virginia and our Tech Lead!] and Stephen Gardner),were able to tackle some questions that we were curious about, such as:
How many women are elected to office in Louisiana?
Where are people of color best represented in Louisiana?
What type of electoral races have the closest margin?
I’d like to thank NationBuilder for giving me the time to indulge my curiosities on this project, and also Charlotte, Stephen, and everyone else in the Data for Democracy community for their help and support — your work is truly appreciated.
**If you are interested in learning more about our project or helping us as we discover more, visit our Github repo.
