Overview

This project explores using election results to gain insights into political spending. That analysis is in a different notebook and we only process results here.

We start with election results by Voting Tabulation Districts as provided by the Texas Legislative Council: Comprehensive Election Datasets (Compressed Format) | Docs.

We’ve been looking at two different things

• To find the most competitive races … to find the two candidates in each district that have the most votes, and then calculate a margin of victory.
• To find simply who won each race. This is problematic as unopposed candidates are not present.

The fields are as follows:

• year: Election year
• election: General, Democratic Primary, Republican Primary, as well was runoff and special elections
• district: State Rep district
• first_place: Last name of race winner
• first_place_party: Winner’s party
• first_place_inc: TRUE if incumbent
• first_place_pct: Percentage of total vote
• second_place: Last name of runner up
• second_place_party: Runner up party
• second_place_inc: TRUE if incumbent
• second_place_pct: Percentage of total vote
• vote_margin: Difference in percentage of total vote
• runoff: T/F value if there was a runoff
• winner: Winner’s last name, if no runoff.
• flg_5: TRUE if margin is 5% or less
• flg_10: TRUE if margin is 10% or less

Contributors:

• Isabella Zeff, MIG data fellow 2024-2025
• Christian McDonald, Associate Professor of Practice