Is the popularity of legal weed still divided by party lines?
In 2012 when marijuana was legalized in Colorado, the state was irrevocably changed. Now something that is a schedule 1 drug federally (the same category as heroin) is legal for Coloradoans across the state. This was met with joy from many, and chagrin from some. In America, the traditional parties are diametrically opposed on this issue. Democrats, the “progressives” largely support legalizing marijuana across the board, with some members who even advocate for federal legalization. The Republicans party on the other hand, largely more conservative, have taken a fittingly conservative stance on the legalization of marijuana, with the party consensus tending towards keeping marijuana illegal, though this seems to be changing. Colorado, as one of the first states to legalize weed, also offers an interesting political view of the issue. Colorado has a range of political loyalties, with the big counties in the state (Denver, Boulder, Adams) being majority Democrat, and the outer counties (Douglas, El Paso etc.) voting staunchly Republican. With cannabis legal statewide, this allows an analytical approach to the issue: are Republican counties still largely against legal weed 10 years after legalization? Or has the time allowed for those who call themselves Republican to change their opinions?
To start this analysis, the first thing I did was do some research on how counties voted during the 2020 election. I will be using this data as an analogue for the general political leaning of the county. I used some of the various election result maps that are still floating around the internet, with the most useful being this one: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/colorado-president-results. Once I had a general political leaning for each county, I assigned a “D” for Democrat and an “R” for Republican to the counties in the “2022_sales” csv from our co_cannabis_sales zip file. I chose to use the sales data for 2022 purely because it’s the most recent. To start, I created a pivot table using pandas to show the party of each county along with their retail cannabis revenue, over the six months that are in the 2022 csv. I chose to use the retail data only, due to the fact that I feel it’s a better indicator of public opinion than Medical use, which has become acceptable in most places.
After looking at the data, Denver, the most populated county in Colorado, blows all of the other counties out of the water, with a total of 263,016,458 dollars of cannabis revenue this year. However, this large number is more likely due to a muddying factor: population. It’s much more likely that Denver has the highest cannabis retail revenue due to it having more people than any other county, rather than it being a largely Democratic leaning county. To combat this, I decided to instead measure the average retail cannabis revenue for all of the counties in Colorado, to try and get a more accurate analysis:
The average revenue for Democrat counties is about 5,000,000 dollars per county, and the average revenue for Republican counties is 1.6 million dollars.
This gives us a better idea of the difference, and it still looks like Democratic counties are blowing Republican counties out of the water. This is a little more normalized than the previous analysis, but due to the fact that Democratic counties, on average, still have more people than Republican counties, the data is still skewed. There are ways to normalize the data, but most of them are things I don’t have any experience with, and after trying (in vain) for a while now, I think normalization might be something I need to brush up on.
My last avenue of analysis I wanted to do was to see how this revenue is changing year over year. To do this, I took the 2021_sales.csv and truncated it it to only 6 months, in order to accurately measure the change.
This time last year, both Democratic and Republican counties had a higher average revenue than they do this year. I’ll be completely candid, this is not what I was expecting. I thought that the average revenue would be higher this year, showing that both parties are becoming more accepting of cannabis. I have a couple of theories as to why the data might be behaving this way.
- In 2021, we were still heavily in the pandemic for most of the year, leading more people to stay at home, potentially increasing cannabis sales.
- The data from 2021 is more complete than the 2022 data. This seems a little unlikely to me, as they both end at 6 months.
Despite running into some technical problems, I think I still found a satisfying answer to my question: Republican counties are more accepting of cannabis now than they were. I feel safe making this conclusion from the simple statistic of about 1.5 million dollars of cannabis sales in Republican counties. That still shows more acceptance than the Republican zeitgeist would have you believe. Thanks for reading!
