Session Ready
Exercise

County-level demographic data and left_join()

One of the bigger questions in political analysis — and data science as a whole — is "Why?" rather than "What?" To answer this question in regards to party performance in US elections, you often need access to data about what types of people live in certain areas. Do more white people live in rural Indiana, making it more Republican? Demographic data can help you answer this question. Answering questions like this is broadly called "causal inference."

Instructions
100 XP
  • Download county-level demographic data to help you in your analysis. This data is gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau and can be directly accessed in R with the choroplethr library.
  • Take a look at the data with head().