Answering "why" questions for elections

So, why are certain areas of the country more Republican? From the maps you generated in the previous exercise, you suspect that the answer is because more white people live there. Because research tells us white Americans are more Republican than African Americans or Hispanics, this makes intuitive sense. But what about going beyond intuition? Use a linear model to tell you if there is a significant, positive relationship between whiteness and Republican-ness.

Create a linear model to predict the Democratic percent of the vote in a county with the percent of white votes that live there. You'll use R's built-in lm() command for this.
Summarize that model and assess whether the statistical results confirm your suspicions about the data. Remember that we're looking for a positive, statistically significant relationship between how white and how Republican a county is.

Exercise

Answering "why" questions for elections

Instructions