5 Conclusion

Throughout our study of Texas’ county voting habits in the 2016 Presidential Election, we have drawn three main conclusions from our analysis.

The first is that counties along the Texas-Mexico border have an undersized influence because they have the lowest voter turnout rates in the state. Coincidentally, these counties also have the highest rates of Hispanic and foreign-born people which minimizes the impact of these voices when voting in Texas. While we are only analyzing this at the Presidential level, this could also be assumed in midterm and state-wide elections as well. Since these counties voted democratically, counter to the rest of the state, it could be reasonably deduced that these counties do not have as strong get out the vote initiatives compared to the rest of the state.

Second, counties with high voter turnout deficit, high foreign-born rates and low-income tend to vote more democratically in Texas. These variables have the lowest estimates in our Queen SAR and estimates that are below the intercept (-1.35) tend to mean that they will vote democratically. All three of these variables are below .062 which shows that they would have little impact on the large negative (democratic) intercept.

Third if a county has more than a 70% white population, it is almost certain that that county will vote Republican. We derived this by looking at the white estimate which is 2.37. If we take this estimate and multiply it by .7 to stand for 70% of the population being white, we end up with 1.659, which is a full standard error larger than the estimate. This means that if a Texas county has over a 70% White population, it is almost certain that they voted for the Republican candidate in 2016.