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County-level analysis of GDP and 2020 election results

Results

^ Visit the link for interactive visualizations with text descriptions. Screenshots below:

1GDPwinner 2GDPwinner_bubbles 3GDPweighted
US counties by GDP and winning party in 2020 presidential election US counties by GDP and winning party in 2020 presidential election - bubble version US counties by weighted GDP - each county's GDP weighted by its D/R vote share
4GDPpercapita 5GDPpercapita_histogram
US counties by GDP per capita and winning party Distribution of GDP per capita among blue and red counties

(Please note that data is not available for all counties.)

Counties won by each major party
d: 512
r: 2550

Proportion of GDP accounted for by counties won by each major party
d: 0.699
r: 0.283

^ Brookings found that "Biden-voting counties equal 70% of America’s economy". They note that "2020 figures reflect unofficial results from 99% of counties. Figures for 2020 represent results from 100% of counties for which 2018 GDP data are available."

Proportion of GDP accounted for by counties won by each major party, but weighting each county's GDP by its D/R vote share
d: 0.498
r: 0.359

GDP per capita across counties won by each major party
d_median: 53.47
r_median: 41.16
d_mean: 60.66
r_mean: 61.87
d_standard_deviation: 40.89
r_standard_deviation: 554.82

^ The distributions of GDP per capita among blue and red counties are different. From these figures, we would expect both distributions to be right-skewed, with a heavier skew for red counties, which is what the histogram shows. Additionally, based on the standard deviations, we would expect a wider distribution for red counties, which is also apparent in the histogram.

Data Sources

Data from some counties is missing. Data available for only 3063 counties.

GDP

Via BEA - GDP by County, Metro, and Other Areas. From this page, I downloaded the dataset "CAGDP1: GDP Summary by County and MSA". Used 2019 data because 2020 data not available yet. County data was used in this analysis, and GDP is in current-dollar GDP (thousands of current dollars).

Population

Population estimates from this page: "Datasets" > "Population, Population Change, and Estimated Components of Population Change: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2019 (CO-EST2019-alldata)"

Election Results

County-level election returns via MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL)

MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2018, "County Presidential Election Returns 2000-2020", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ, Harvard Dataverse, V9, UNF:6:qSwUYo7FKxI6vd/3Xev2Ng== [fileUNF]