Chapter 1 Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic being the most consequential global event in the year of 2020 has impacted everyone and every country in the world, and it has also shaped every facet of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. In an environment of continued uncertainty, states changed their rules of voting with the objective of arranging COVID-safe elections, but the surge in absentee/mail-in ballots has inevitably extended the post-election vote counting in some states. This issue aroused continued disputes over the election integrity in the two weeks until the Associated Press finally called Joe Biden the winner of the presidential race. Donald Trump and his proxies repeatedly attacked mail voting and sowed doubts on the process and made conspiratorial claims of voting fraud, saying the election was “stolen”. Although these claims have been proven false and baseless by voting officials in both parties, we were still curious about if there exists other evidence that has provided hints of Biden’s win. Some case studies and analysis have discussed how the US economic conditions, the racial unrest, and Trump’s response to COVID-19 have impacted the odds of Trump being reelected, but we chose to focus on the public funding of the presidential election, and see if the raisings and spendings of election campaigns were linked to determining the winner of 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

In the project, we collected the voting results data from The Cook Political Report and FOX News, as well as the presidential election committee contributions and disbursements data from Federal Election Commission to generate visualizations and conduct investigations on the relationships between campaign finance and election results. We would like to carry out analysis from both geographic and time series perspectives and answer the following questions:

  • Is there anything surprising about the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election results?
  • How much have presidential election committees raised and spent this year?
  • Did contributions reflect the expectations and choices of people of the United States?
  • What were each campaign’s spending strategies and how effective were those strategies in leading the election?

In the following chapters, we will discuss these questions and provide some new insights on forecasting the election outcomes.

For more details of this project, click the link here or copy the url https://github.com/NeverGiveUpDXQ/2020-U.S.-Election-Visualizations.git and open it in browser to go to our Github repository and navigate code in .Rmd files.