Illuminating America: Divorce a Poor Predictor for 2016 Election

Description: In the third round of Charted Territory’s “Illuminating America” series¹, county-level divorce rates only explain 25% of the 2016 election result, the poorest explanatory variable to date.
Chart: Opinion of climate change happening (x-axis) plotted against Trump vote for the 2016 election. Each bubble is an individual county. All counties above 50% on the y-axis voted for Trump, counties below voted for Clinton. Bubble area is proportional to county population. Bubble color depicts whether the county is in a Red or Blue state.
Observation: With an r-squared value of only 0.05, only 25% of the county-level 2016 election can be explained by the county-level divorce rates (increasing divorce rate is weakly associated with an increasing Trump vote).

¹Rank of each variable; ²Variable name; ³Percentage of counties that have data coverage; ⁴Regression type (linear; exponential; or power); ⁵Data weighted by county population; ⁶Correlation between variable and Trump vote; ⁷R-squared value; ⁸Percent of county-level results correctly predicted (value outside parentheses is the average success of predicting Republican and Democrat counties separately).
Methods and data: County-level divorce rates are taken from the National Center for Family & Marriage Research with the Center for Family and Demographic Research². County-level 2016 election results were compiled by Charted Territory by visiting each state’s Secretary of State web page. The data were compiled and visualized using Microsoft Excel³.

1. https://chartedterritory.us/2018/07/18/illuminating-america-chlamydia-and-the-2016-election/
2. https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/original-data/county-level-marriage-divorce-data-2010.html
3. https://products.office.com/en-us/excel