Are Republicans Racist?

A Democrat pinged me with a challenge to examine voter data to determine whether it demonstrates any racial bias for Republicans. As a registered Libertarian, I believe I have eliminated all bias in my analysis. Today, I wanted to share my findings.

I downloaded data from the Connecticut Elections Enforcement Agency to understand campaign contributions as the first point of analysis and discovered the following:

• Minority candidates who run on the republican ticket are less likely to get full funding than when they run as Democrats. In Connecticut, a candidate has to get a lot of small donations from in-state voters, which will, depending on the office they are running for, then get supplemented by state funds. There are two distinct ways this data can be interpreted. (1) Republicans at large won't reach into their wallets to help minority candidates be successful (2) The State of Connecticut has created a program that engages in a form of systemic racism against minority candidates.
• I applied a very crude filter to determine ethical boundaries for the candidates and the donors. The data shows that Jewish people at large are not open to contributing to minority candidates in our state. There is no dataset that I have identified that explains any reason for this observation.
• The data suggests that Republicans are willing to cross the aisle to support the funding of candidates they like, regardless of race. In contrast, I could not identify any significant pattern of Democrats supporting reporting candidates via campaign donations regardless of affinity.
• The data does show a strong affinity for certain ethnic groups to support each other regardless of political party. For example, Jewish People support other Jewish People, or Indian people support other Indian people. The data does not show the same behavior for black Americans.

I also got a hold of the voter registration data in Connecticut did some other analysis, and discovered a few areas of bias that were noteworthy:

• Minority candidates seem to get many more opportunities to run for elected office at the state level than for town-level openings. Town-level positions are dominated by old-timers regardless of party.
• The old timers, or those who have run for re-election multiple times, seem to be blocking minority candidates from success, which raises the age-old question of whether we need term limits for all government positions. Occupying a seat seems more of a Republican challenge in local elections than for Democrats.
• I applied a diversity filter to understand racial patterns and discovered that in many towns, those who ultimately get elected reflect the diversity of that town. For example, in a town where the majority of residents were mostly black, both parties had black candidates. The same thing goes for towns that were mostly white. One pattern that I saw visually but could not quantify felt as if, in towns that were close to parity in their racial makeup, the odds tilted towards having more minority candidates in elected office for democrats while it showed a bias towards older white males being in the mix of candidates for republicans. The data suggests that gentrification may be driving specific demographics toward the republican party, where the old-timers are playing a last-man-standing game.

Conclusion

These were the questions I was able to answer using data that I could get my hands on. I also analzed the data for any trends but could not get specific enough to identify them. One thing I looked for are trends that would suggest either increasing or decreasing racism and saw that the data had drift depending on particular areas of the state.

There are a growing number of Black Americans willing to register as Republicans. For some reason, the data shows that the dividing line is gender, where black males seem to be more open to political diversity compared to females. I have no explanation for this.

The state datasets do not contain information on candidates running for federal office slots like Congress. I am certain that this dataset will likely tell a different story compared to state or local elections. We have many Black American Republicans in Congress who have gotten elected from majority white parts of the United States. If anyone knows of a dataset that would help clarify the distinction in behavior, please do not hesitate to leave a comment.