The Demographics of Close Congressional Races

This repository contains data and analyses supporting the BuzzFeed News article, "Black Voters Are Underrepresented In This Year’s Biggest House Races," published October 18, 2018.

Data

The data for this analyses came from two sources:

• The U.S. Census. The data/census directory contains three files: table04b.xls from the Census's Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2016 and two files (CD.csv and State.csv) from the Citizen Voting Age Population by Race and Ethnicity (CVAP) estimates. The CVAP estimates are based on the American Community Survey from 2012-2016.

• FiveThirtyEight. The analyses use FiveThirtyEight's House and Senate forecasts for the 2018 midterm election. BuzzFeed News downloaded the data in these calculations on October 18, 2018 at approximately 4pm U.S. Eastern time, and saved them to the data/fivethirtyeight directory. The code used to collect and restructure the data can be found in the notebooks/00-download-fivethirtyeight-data.ipynb.

Analysis

The article relies on two different analyses, each combining FiveThirtyEight's forecasts and the Census's demographic data. The first analysis compares demographic differences in close House and close Senate races versus the rest of the nation; the code can be found here. The second analysis quantifies relative voting power vis-a-vis race/ethnicity, using the "Voter Power Index"; the code can be found here.

Licensing

All code in this repository is available under the MIT License. The data in the data/census directory was created by the U.S. Census and is released into the public domain.

Questions / Comments?

Please contact John Templon at john.templon@buzzfeed.com.

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