vote_gov_states: Gubernatorial Election Polling Data

In AmberlyDziesinski/ds: Files for Vanderbilt Data Science 1000

Description

Loads clean version of gubernatorial election polling data into the environment. This dataset includes polling data and elections outcomes for Gubernatorial elections in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2018.

Usage

data(vote_gov_states)

Format

Data are structured as one observation per poll. Variables include:

year

Year of election

race

Type of election race

state

State abbreviation

pollster

Organization conducingthe poll and weighting

end_date

The last day the respondant was able to take the poll

sample_size

The number of respondents who completed the poll

moe

Reported margin of error for the surveys; calculated as the sample proportion of respondents supporting the Democratic candidate in unreported (commonly unreported for internet surveys)

dem_poll

The percent of respondents supporting the Democratic candidate in the poll

rep_poll

The percent of respondents supporting the Republican candidate in the poll

ind_poll

The percent of respondents supporting the (leading) independent candidatein the poll (if relevant)

other_poll

The percent of respondents supporting "Other" in the poll (if relevant)

undecided

The percent of respondents "Undecided" in the poll (if relevant)

poll_margin

Poll margin between candidates, calculated as (dem_poll-rep_poll)

poll_vote_margin

Difference between the poll margin and vote margin, calculated as ((dem_poll-rep_poll)-(dem_vote-rep_vote))

error_on_margin

Error on poll-vote margin, calculated as the absolute value of ((dem_poll-rep_poll)-(dem_vote-rep_vote))

error_on_candidate

The difference in error due to each candidate, calculated as ((dem_poll-rep_poll)-(dem_vote-rep_vote))/2

dem_vote

The certified vote supporting the Democratic candidate in the election

rep_vote

The certified vote supporting the Republican candidate in the election

ind_vote

The certified vote supporting the leading independent candidate in the election

vote_margin

Difference between Democrat and Republican vote, calculated as (dem_vote-rep_vote)

winner_election

Party of the candidate who won the election

winner_poll

Party of the candidate who was predicted to win in the poll

winner_projected

Indicator that the poll correctly predicted the winner: 1=yes, 0=no

Details

These data were cleaned for the purpose of Data Science 1000 in the following way: variables with substantial missing data were removed (for example, if a variable was not reported in most years), and the margin of error was calculated where unreported using the sample proportion of respondents supporting the Democratic candidate.

Source

The historical data comes from three sources. General election data (national presidential, statewide presidential, senate, and governor) prior to 2012 are from the National Council on Public Polls (http://www.ncpp.org/) website. National and Statewide presidential polls in 2016 are from the 2016 AAPOR Task Force on Pre-Election polls, as are the primary polls from 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. Data for the 2018 Midterm Elections was collected by a task force created in 2018 at the request of AAPOR Council President David Dutwin consisting of Evans Witt (PSRAI), Scott Clement (Washington Post) and Ariel Edwards-Levy (Huffington Post).

Examples

# Run descriptive statistics on the data:
#hist(moe)
#table(winner_election)
#mean(sample_size)

AmberlyDziesinski/ds documentation built on Dec. 17, 2021, 8:45 a.m.