Pre-election Interviews: A Political Opinion Assessment Part 1 The Issues

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Political Opinion Assessment
Part 1
The Issues
The first political opinion issue is the party of registration that Americans are affiliated
with. This relates to interviews that were done pre-election regardless of method employed in
information acquisition. The variable id is V161019 and the weight associated with pre-election
interview variables is V160101. The interviewee was presented with five response option when
asked about their party of registration. These five options are: Democratic Party, Republican
Party, none or independent, and other. According to the tabulation results 46.1% align with
Democratic Party, 31% are faithful to Republican Party, 21.9% has no affiliation or they are
independent, and 0.9% are registered with other parties. The majority of interviewees prior to the
2016 elections are democrats which indicate a good political backing for presidential candidates
in the Democratic Party[ CITATION Ste13 \l 1033 ]. The second largest affiliation group is that
of republican supporters.
It is however important to note that there is considerably larger difference of 15.1%
between the Democratic Party supporters and Republican Party supporters. This means that if an
election was to be held at the time of the interviews the Democratic Party's presidential candidate
would beat his Republican opponent by a margin of 15.1%. It is also vital to not that the number
of respondents who indicated they were not registered with any political party is considerably
high at 21%. This can be interpreted to mean that this niche of voters is still undecided on who
to vote for or they have mixed opinions with regard to both Republican and Democratic political
ideologies. Lastly, only a very small group of interviews indicated they had registered with other
parties other than Republican and Democratic parties.

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The second political issue is whether the participant being interviewed voted for president
in 2012. The interviewees were asked to specify whether they voted for Barrack Obama in the
2012 elections. Their responses were limited to a yes or no answer; yes if the person voted for
Barrack Obama in the 2012 elections, and no if the individual did not vote for Barrack Obama to
be president (he/she may have voted for other candidates in the presidential run). The variable id
for this issue is V161005, and since this information was collected prior to the 2016 election the
weight variable is V160101. According to the data analysis results presented below, 69.1% of all
respondents indicated that they voted for Barrack Obama, while 30.9% of the interviewees voted
for another presidential candidate or failed to partake in the presidential election exercise.
Out of the 30.9% it is possible that some individuals did not vote for the president
because they were underage at the time or they were barred from taking part in the whole
election exercise because of personal hindrances[ CITATION Ach08 \l 1033 ]. The summary

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statistics can be ignored because they do not provide any helpful information when dealing with
categorical variables. The stacked bar chart does however provide a clear representation of
people's responses with regard to whether or not they voted for the president in 2012. The
number of valid cases or data values greatly outweighs the missing values or invalid figures
making the information presented above very credible. The results can also be synthesized to
mean that during the 2012 election 69.1% of all voters were aligned with the Democratic Party.
Inferences can be made from this information to forecast that a significant number of these
supporters would still voter under the Democratic Party umbrella during the 2016 election.
The third political opinion issue is with regard to whom the participant voted for
president in the 2016 election. This relates to interviewee data collected after the 2016 elections;
as such the individuals are presented with an array of responses that allows them to select the
choose that aligns to their presidential candidate. Some of the response options are tailored to
those interviewees who are unwilling to state who they voted for, or did not vote for a
presidential candidate. The variable id for this issue is V162034A and the accompanying post

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election weight variable is V160102. The results indicate that a majority of respondents voted for
Hillary Clinton (48.8%); while, 44% of all interviewees voted for Donald Trump to be the next
president. The participants who voted for Gary Johnson were only 4.1% and those who opted for
Jill Steiin were 1.3%. 1.4% of the participants indicated they voted for other candidates who
were not specified in the questionnaire. 0.3% did not indicate who they voted for personal
reasons.
The response statistics do align with election results because the majority vote went to
Hillary Clinton but she however missed out on the Electoral College majority vote. None of the
participant interviewed after the 2016 election failed to vote for a presidential candidate; this
supported by the 0% on the number of people who failed to vote for any of the candidates.
Similar to the prior two issue assessments the summary statistics should be ignored because the
assessment variables are categorical. The column bar graph shows that the number of
participants who voted for Hillary and Trump were almost the same; since, there is no easy way
of telling the difference between the votes cast for each candidate just by looking at the chart.
The validity of the results is good and this is investigated by comparing the data used and
omitted i.e. the number of valid cases compared to cases that were excluded by weight and
invalid codes.