Bartenders for Bernie - Article Analysis
As the US 2020 presidential campaign starts to heat up, people across America are choosing sides and gearing up their support for their elected candidates.
Although the team here at White Box won’t be voting in the US election, we love discussing data and as such, were interested when we came across this piece of analysis. ActBlue, which is an online fundraising platform for the Democratic Party released a huge amount of data on small donors. Of the political candidates, Bernie Sanders is by far the most popular Democratic candidate, particularly among small donors of which he now has the support of over 1 million individuals! Drilling down into this discussion point further, we looked at ActBlue’s 2018 Election Cycle in Review and found that the average small donor gives just $34.50. Although it doesn’t seem like much, when there’re almost 5 million individual donors giving that amount, it soon adds up. In the 2018 election cycle alone, ActBlue raised over $1.6bn from small donors.
The analysis also includes interesting graphs which identify how people are voting with reference to their income and educational attainment levels. When looking at the graphs displayed, Sanders again appears to be an outlier, with a strong negative correlation identifiable between income level and voter support - that is, Bernie is a favourite amongst the poorest and working class people. A similar trend is also prevalent in the second graph, with those without BA’s representing the greatest proportion of votes, although this negative relationship isn’t quite as strong.
A powerful feature of this article is the ability to choose your own occupation to see where those in the same job as you are placing their support for US Democratic candidates. Funnily enough, Bernie comes out on top (again) for data analysts. Of the top occupations for Bernie however, it is those working as solar photovoltaic installers (74%) leading the pack, followed relatively closely by vet assistants (63%) and bartenders (59%).
Is Bernie the right choice for America’s 46th President, or will the powers of Republican big money propel Trump into another tenure?
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