Trump Votes and Median Income

In this assignment I made some data frames of county data which included all the counties in the country showing how the votes for the county. As in the percent of votes Trump lost and how many he had. I sorted the dataframe by the 2016 to 2020 shift in votes. That was showing how counties in 2016 voted compared to 2020. For example Autauga, Alabama had a shift of -1.4. So his votes went down 1.4 points. This is not the most accurate way to see if people favor him or not because he still has 71.4 percent of the votes in Autauga county. Even though he went down 1.4% he still has a huge majority of the votes. The data frame that I made first to get a good idea of what to look at was with every state county amount of covid cases and votes for Trump in 2020 and the shift in between 2016 and 2020. I then filtered it down to Colorado due to one I live here so I am more interested in the data for Colorado than I am with Alabama. Once I filtered it down to just Colorado I was interested to see which counties in Colorado had the biggest shift from 2016 to 2020. I was surprised to see Alamosa, Conejos, Jackson, Bent, and Mineral. Five places that I have not heard of. I also made a chart showing all the counties in Colorado showing which counties rose up in votes for Trump. Colorado had 28 counties that gained votes and 34 that did not

So to find these two charts are what I referred to earlier. With that I went and found a csv file that has all the county coordinates for colorado in it so I would then be able to see which places had these rise in votes.

I was then able to create the map with pins that are able to be clicked to then be able to see which country it is. Once I saw this it made more sense, the people who vote for trump are more of the blue color people. These places are in those more rural areas where there may be more people like that. After this I went to see the median income of these counties to then get a better Idea of the people that may be here. The Median income of these five counties is 33,699 a year. This is in 2019 so it is going to be a little different now. I then compared that to the top five median income for the highest counties.

Then I put together these bar charts to look at them side by side. The gray is flipped upside down. The lowest income on the top 5 Trump vote graph is Alamosa county at $30,213. The lowest on the highest median income is Routt County at 87,691. Quite the difference I then plotted these counties on a map as well. The major cities are Steamboat, Aspen, Vail, Boulder, Lakewood, and Evergreen. Some of these cities are known for how nice they are. Then after all that I realized I needed to see what the votes were like to see if lower income places had a higher Trump vote shift. The five other countries all lost votes for Trump the highest at 2.7. Which is not even too close to the lowest of the smaller counties. Once I was able to see these shifts I looked into the populations and unemployment levels. I also looked at the unemployment as well to see if there was a correlation. Total there are 2,895,743 people employed in Colorado, with 226,764 unemployed. Alamosa 7,868 employed and 535 unemployed with a total population of 16377. Jackson 900 employed and 40 unemployed with a total population of 1375. Conejos 3844 employed and 227 unemployed with a total population of 7579. Bent 1748 employed and 80 unemployed with a total population of 5861. Mineral 442 employed and 27 unemployed with a total population of 794. This shows how few people are in these counties. As these counties may be bigger but that does not mean there are more people. Routt 14,929 employed and 1277 unemployed with a total population of 24899. Pitkin 10077 employed and 1176 unemployed with a total population of 17471. Jefferson 310057 employed and 23625 unemployed with a total population of 580130. Eagle 32319 employed and 3389 unemployed with a total population of 55693. Boulder 180992 employed and 11887 unemployed with a total population of 328713. With this we can see even though some of these countries are really big these numbers are vastly different. To conclude I see that there may be a correlation to these more outdoorsy places having more places to explore having a higher shift to Trump. It is true that they do have a lower median income. But these countries also have way less people. These higher median counties are places that are very well known such as Aspen. There are some high rollers that go to that place. I can not say that lower median incomes are decreased from people voting for Trump. But the unemployment is lower in these counties with the votes for Trump.