Predicting how Localities of Maryland might vote in the future
Using three demographics, the partisanship of an area can be predicted
Factors that Predict Partisanship
A week ago, Sabato’s Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Louis Jacobson published an insightful analysis about how demographics can predict a state’s partisanship. In the analysis, Jacobson ranked all 50 states by the amount of residents who are white, how many residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and population density. Finally, he added together the rankings of each state, and ordered them by the composite score of the rankings. States that were ranked higher were predicted to be more Republican, while those ranked lower were predicted to be more Democratic.
The analysis sparked interest from election twitter analyst Aaron Olson, who applied the same methodology to calculate the rankings of every county in Indiana. I was fascinated by how the results of the calculation showed where both parties out-perform and under-perform what demographics would suggest. I also came away with the conclusion that the calculation could possibly predict how much both parties have to gain and lose support in particular areas in the future. I decided to calculate the rankings for the localities of Maryland.
Below is a table of my findings. I included the rankings of localities of Maryland by Biden’s 2-party vote share for comparison:
Source: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts
Of the ten counties who scored the highest, nine of them voted for Trump. The one exception is Kent County, which is home to the private liberal arts school of Washington College in Chestertown. While being this high in the rankings could portend the county becoming more firmly Republican, such a trend has yet to materialize; Kent has been one of the most closely-divided counties in Maryand for the last few decades and stayed true-to-form in 2020, with Joe Biden winning the county by one percentage point.
Of the ten localities that scored the lowest, only two voted for Donald Trump: Calvert and Harford. Calvert is an exurb of Washington D.C. along the Chesapeake Bay. In addition to professional commuters, it has numerous hospitality and service workers employed at resorts in Calvert. Both groups have been trending Democratic in recent years, giving Democrats reason to be optimistic about their chances in Calvert in short- to medium-term. Harford County is mostly suburban in nature, though has remained Republican longer than Maryland’s other suburbs. An army facility, the Aberdeen Proving Ground, is located in Harford, giving it a military-friendly population population that leans Republican. Joe Biden was the best-performing Democratic presidential candidate in Harford in decades, but still lost it by 12 percentage points, likely meaning that it will remain decidedly Republican-leaning for at least another decade.
To demonstrate the correlation of Biden’s vote share with demographic rank, I made a scatter plot of the two:
While the calculation is relatively accurate, I would caution reading too much into them. New fault lines could appear within the electorate at any time.