State-by-state voting information in the 2008 US
presidential election, along with contextual information
on income, unemployment, ethnicity and religion.
Format
A data frame with 52 observations (one for each US state)
and the following columns.
State
The name of the US state.
Region
The US Federal region.
Obama
Percentage of voters who voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
McCain
Percentage of voters who voted for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.
Turnout
Percentage of people who voted in the 2008 presidential election.
Unemployment
Percentage of people who are unemployed.
Income
Mean annual income in US dollars.
Population
Number of people living in the state.
Catholic
Percentage of people identifying as Catholic.
Protestant
Percentage of people identifying as Protestant.
Other
Percentage of people identifying as religious, but not Catholic or Protestant.
Non.religious
Percentage of people identifying as non-religious.
Black
Percentage of people identifying as black.
Latino
Percentage of people identifying as Latino.
Urbanization
Percentage of people living in an urban area.
Note
Religious identification data are not available for
Alaska and Hawaii. The totals of these columns is
generally less than 100, since some people didn't give an
answer. The District of Columbia is included, even though
it isn't a state. The dataset is not guaranteed to be
error free. Please double check the data if you want to
use it for something serious.