Why so Blue? Population Characteristics Affecting Presidential Voting Habits of the Tallahassee MSA

Voting is quite possibly the most honest thing that an individual can do. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know beyond a doubt that a voter actually voted for the person for whom he or she said they voted. To identify how groups of individuals vote, researchers must understand how a general group of voters tend to vote. These broad generalizations are akin to stereotyping; African Americans vote Democratic or white male Southerners vote Republican. These are not necessarily inaccurate statements, but they hide the complexity behind how an individual decides to cast his or her vote. Around presidential election cycles, there are many published studies and analyses which show how the nation votes. These include longitudinal studies focusing on voting in metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas (Morrill et al. 2007) to unraveling political ideology and party identification using election night surveys (Smith 1999). The body of literature which focuses on what makes people and places either Republican (red) or Democratic (blue) reveals that there is no blanket statement which can apply to the voting habits of anyone group of people. Instead, a characteristic that correlates with a group of voters leaning Democratic in one area of the United States may be the same characteristic that correlates to a similar group of voters leaning Republican in a different place. Some demographic or socio-economic variables do not have a linear relationship to voting in a region, but when a part of that variable is isolated, it turns out that there is indeed a strong relationship between one part of that variable and voting. Understanding these relationships can be applied to understanding why the Tallahassee MSA has been a consistently Democratic voting region over the last two decades