This repository contains data useful to folks analyzing elections in Cheatham County TN.
The "data" folder contains two spreadsheets:
- "Cheatham_County_Data_for_US_Presidential_elections_1856_to_2020.csv" contains data on US Presidential elections in Cheatham from 1856 to 2020
- "Cheatham_Precinct_Data_for_state_federal_races_1998_to_2020.csv" contains data on state/federal elections in Cheatham from 1998 to 2020
- "Cheatham_Local_Election_Sample_Spreadsheet.csv" is a sample template to create a database of local elections
- "Cheatham_Population.csv" contains data on Cheatham County's population. Currently from 1856 to 2021. The "population" column contains official numbers from the US Census. The "population_interp" column uses a cubic spline to interpolate missing values from 1856 to 1970 since those years only have official values every 10 years during a census.
These data files can be opened using a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, or Google Sheets, or a database program like Access or LibreOffice Base, but for analysis I highly recommend data science software like R/RStudio (hard but what I use, click here for free version), Tableau (click here to download free version for Windows), or Microsoft Power BI.
The "gis_shapefiles" folder contains GIS shapefile maps of county precincts going back to 2000. These are useful if you are trying to map the data in the spreadsheets above.
I will, as time allows, add some example code using R to load, analyze, and graph/map the data.
