Pundit after Pundit has said that the race of 2016 is going to be about race based voting patterns & turn out. It is generally understood that the Republican party has an advantage among whites. This understanding was based on exit poll data or pre-poll opinion polls.

We tried to use actual voting patterns to dig a little bit deeper to understand if it was true. We pulled county based vote share data based on 2012 presidential elections and then co-related that with populations by race for each county from Census data. We further classified counties into 4 major categories:

1: Counties with >90%- White Share of Population

2: Counties with 60% to 90%- White Share of Population

3: Counties with 40% to 60%- White Share of Population

4: Counties with 0% to 40%- White Share of Population

Within each of those 4 major categories, we then analyzed Republican vote share across 3 major categories - Republican leaning states (e.g. Texas, Alabama, Utah etc…), Democratic leaning states (New York, California etc…) & Swing states (e.g. Ohio, Florida etc…)









The below chart shows the data from the major categories of white population & Republican vote share.





What seems to be overwhelmingly clear across Republican leaning states, Democratic leaning states & Swing States is that as White share of population increases the share of Republican votes goes up. For instance, in Republican leaning states, in counties with 90% or greater White population, Republicans got 67% of the votes & in swing states, they got 55% of the share. Even in Democrat leaning states, if the white share of population is more than 90%, Republicans manage to pull even.

The data from actual voting patterns tend to re-inforce that Republicans have a strong advantage among Whites.

But, is that enough?



