Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Social Sciences
First Advisor
Reilly, Jack
Area of Concentration
Political Science
Abstract
The last couple Presidential elections in Florida have resulted in important electoral victories and gains for the Democratic Party. These victories, however, are starkly contrasted by the consistent failure of the Democratic Party to replicate the successes experienced with the Presidential cycle during the Midterm cycle. This failure poses an important question: why do the voters of Florida vote for Republican candidates during disproportionately Midterm elections instead of during the Presidential cycle? This paper believes that the answer to this question can be found by analyzing the existing voting patterns of different aspects of the current Florida electorate over the last couple election cycles. While there is existing political literature that discusses national voter trends in turnout, there is little to no state-specific research out there for Florida. This problem is mitigated through the manipulation and recoding of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study publicly put out by Harvard every year to look specifically at Floridian respondents. These respondents are then broken down into independent variables such as gender and income that are run through logistic regression testing to create predicted probabilities that show the likelihood of these groups voting in an election and their likely party identification. The results of this data showed that those groups that are most likely to vote for the Democratic Party and identify as members of the Democratic Party are less likely to vote during the Midterm election than during the Presidential. Overall there seems to be a lower percentage of voting by the Democratic Party across all election years for local and state races. The results of this study are a beginning point for future in-depth research into voting trends that have an impact beyond the scope of just Florida.
Recommended Citation
Poe, Zachary David, "What's Going on with Florida?: An Investigation into the Disproportionate Voting Trends of the Florida Electorate" (2016). Theses & ETDs. 5260.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5260