My original plan for Project 3 was to research election results in Cary, NC, the town I sent postcards to and focused on in Project 2. However, that data hadn’t been released by Thanksgiving, so I chose a different route. Another 2020 race I followed closely was Sara Gideon’s challenge to Susan Collins in the US Senate. I participated in this race by making donations and by switching my voter registration back from New York to Maine, since I resided there for the majority of 2020 and was therefore legally able to do so.
Collins has historically presented herself as a centrist who doesn’t always vote along Republican party lines, and had been endorsed by Planned Parenthood of Maine for many years until they switched their endorsement to Sara Gideon. Many Mainers have grown disillusioned with Collins’ ostensible centrism, particularly after she cast a decisive vote in 2018 to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Nationally, Democrats counted Gideon as as an important (and relatively safe) step towards taking back control of the U.S. Senate. The poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight gave Sara Gideon 2:1 odds of winning the seat in its final prediction before the election. In the end, however, while Maine went for Biden with over 52% of its vote, Gideon lost her bid for the Senate seat with less than 42% of the vote. Collins even secured a majority, with just over 50%.
This Senate race gained national attention because people saw it as a chance to flip the Senate to a Democratic majority, so I think the nature of the results could be interesting to anyone who was interested in the race. That being said, I was trying to work with a Maine audience in mind. I think, to some extent, I accomplished that — I’ve been looking at different political visualizations of Maine’s results since I finished my own, and I haven’t seen any that explicitly compare the presidential-senate pairings.
Data was available for Maine’s elections at all levels, and I was interested in a comparison between Maine’s presidential and Senatorial races. I wanted to follow up on the reports that Collins benefited from split tickets that chose Joe Biden for President but then voted for her at the Congressional level. My initial research question was which towns and counties Maine voters were most aligned along party lines in their Presidential and Senate choices, and where they were most split.
I planned to do this using a scatterplot and a map, and I think these ended up being the right choices for this data. The scatterplot allows viewers to appreciate the strong trend in the data, and to see every town ordered by its Senate and Presidential choice, from most Democratic-leaning to most Republican-leaning. It’s clear that the dots are skewed upwards, towards the “Democratic President” part of the axis, and to the right, towards the “Republican Senator” part of the axis. Overall, the trend is pushed about 20 percentage points in favor of Biden and Collins — that is, in towns where Biden was beating Trump by 20%, Susan Collins was toeing the line for win or loss. If Susan Collins was beating Sara Gideon by 20%, Biden was toeing the win-loss line. (That, as opposed to Gideon always winning where Biden won, or Collins always losing where Trump lost, in which case the points would all be along the line Y=X.) There are towns in the quadrant that went Biden-Gideon, Biden-Collins, and Trump-Collins. There are no towns that went Trump-Gideon. The larger towns are in the blue, Democratic part of the plot, and smaller towns are mostly in the red, Republican part of the plot.
The map lends geographical context and completes the visual thesis that the scatterplot begins by showing that the pairings are clustered geographically by town size and by distance up, and from, the coast. Of the map, I had said: “This is harder for me to visualize in advance. I know that coastal Maine is where most of the state’s Democrats live and the large inland swaths are more Republican. However, given the background narrative of Collins as a bipartisan/ “not-like-other-Republicans” Republican, her hold on the coast might be a little tighter than one would expect.“
Indeed, the map shows Republicans’ strong hold in small inland towns– these went overwhelmingly for both Collins and Trump. And the larger coastal towns were almost entirely blue, voting for Gideon and Biden. What surprised me in its consistency, however, is that the “purple,” centrist part of the state is also geographically between the red and blue parts.
In order to answer my initial question, I’d have to get data from previous elections — I’m looking now and I see that it’s available in identical Excel format for 2014 and 2008, so perhaps I’ll add some context to the 2020 Election map just for fun. I’m particularly curious about 2008’s Presidential-Senate pairings now! It seems like an obvious Part II to this project, and would lend valuable context to understanding how Maine’s political momentum may have shifted over the course of Susan Collins’ career.
