2012 American Election

Data from the 2012 pollsters were analysed
to understand partecipants preferences for presidential election.

For this project I have used data from HuffPost Pollster website and they can be directly be downloaded here.

Data Preview

Observations

  • The data has 586 rows and 17 columns
  • The data contains 1157 NaN values
  • There are no duplicate rows
  • The entire column for Question Text produced NaN
  • Some partecipants were undecided or opted for other

Data Dictionary

Variable Definition
Pollster Pollster name
Start Date Start of the pollster
End Date End of the pollster
Entry Date/Time (ET) Date and time when the data has been uploaded
Numbers of Observations Number of partecipants in the pollster
Population Type of population who partecipated
Mode Mode of the pollster
Obama How many partecipants were in favour of Obama
Romney How many partecipants were in favour of Romney
Undecided How many partecipants were undecided
Other Other parameters included in the pollster
Pollster URL Pollster URL link
Source URL Source URL link
Partisan How many partisans in the pollster
Affiliation Affiliation of the pollster association
Question Text N/A
Question Iteration Number of question iterations

Affiliations of the polls

Observations

  • Most of the polls were neutral, but there were more Democrats affiliations compared to the Republicans' polls

Voters preferences for Obama vs. Romney

Observations

  • Preferences for the two candidates are very similar
  • Nearly 10% of the participants declared that they were undecided or that they preferred other candidates.

Countplot of voters preferences subdivided by days

To simplify the graphic, I analysed voters' preferences for Obama or Romney by date. If they preferred Obama, the graphic shows a positive number for the day. If the number is negative, they preferred Romney.

Observations

  • There are no large variations in preferences over the course of 27 days

Voter preferences on the day of the pollsters and public debates

2012 American public debates:
-03 October 2012
-11 October 2012
-22 October 2012

Observations

  • After the first debate, the public was in favour of Romney by about 3%.
  • After the second and third debates the public didn't express particulant preference.

Conclusion

The pollsters showed equal preferences between the two candidates through the pre-election period. It comes as no surprise that at the 2012 American election Obama won with a majority of just 51%.