Exploring Candidate Perceptions in Elections with R

The American National Election Studies (ANES) are surveys of voters in the U.S. on a national scale. For each presidential election since 1980, ANES has collected information about the personality traits of presidential candidates, by asking how well 8 personality traits describe republican and democratic candidates. The traits surveyed were Intelligence, Compassion, Decency, Inspiring, Knowledge, Morals, Leadership, and Caring, and respondents could rank each trait on a scale of one to four, one being “Extremely well” and four being “Not well at all.” For this analysis anes_dem, refers to opinions on the democratic candidate, and anes_rep refers to opinions on the republican.

With this data, we explore not only the perceptions of individuals in individual races, but general perceptions by party, how that has changed over time, and what impact that has on voters’ decisions.

I looked at 3 main questions:

• What qualities describe do voters use to describe Democrats and Republicans?
• How have voters’ perceptions around a party’s candidates changed over time?
• What is the relationship between character perception and votes?

See the investigation here

This project was part of the class Applied Data Science (STAT GR5243) which I took in Spring 2021.