Skip to Content
  Contact Us

Notes from Regional Strategic, Ltd.

Demographic Analysis of Votes Cast

We have recently been engaged in some demographic analysis of voter data here at Regional Strategic, Ltd. While a lot of news is made with exit polls on election day, those polls are seldom representative of the population as a whole. News organizations position pollsters at select stations, but they don’t have the resources to cover the gamut of socio-economic areas represented by precincts nationwide. They rely on sampling frames (see our November 24, 2024 blog at www. regionalstrategic.com/wp/the-moveable-middle-statistics-information-progress/ for some thoughts on sampling frames) which rely on expert insights that may have as much to do with news value as with statistical coverage.

After the fact, substantial voter analysis can be done with official statistics. Regional Strategic, Ltd. is supporting some analysis in Iowa utilizing data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office:

  • The January 6, 2025 release of the Iowa Voter Registration Database. This includes all Iowa voter registrations on January 6 and information on their voting history. January 6 is the first release that includes 2024 general election information for all current registrants.
  • The Official Canvass by County, which includes vote totals, undervotes, and overvotes for every state and federal office contested in the election on a county level.
  • Precinct Results by County, which brings vote counts down to a precinct level.

The Iowa Voter Registration Database is the largest of these. It comes in at more than 2.2 million records with 132 fields. It offers information on voter age, sex, location (address, county, precinct) and voting history. It comes in multiple files for each of four congressional districts.

The first step is to combine files by district. The entire state is too big to conveniently handle in Excel. The 3rd Congressional District was consolidated and cleaned up. There are always some broken and/or incomplete files. This isn’t due to malfeasance or incompetence. In a world where taxpayers insist on paring government functions to the bone, there simply is not enough help to adequately process the masses of data and sources of data that must be reconciled. This scarcity of resources is also evident in the period of two months that is necessary to release files after an election.

The 2025 registration file is an improvement over recent periods. Only 10 damaged records were encountered in the 569,000 records for the 3rd Congressional District. These were all successfully reconciled into 4 complete records. As a result, the 3rd Congressional District file for analysis contained 568,994 registration records. The fields were checked to make certain all general 2024 election results were in the proper field (this year they were – another improvement). At this point, we had a data file for analysis.

Original fields allow data to be separated by county and precinct. These generate fields for national and statewide offices, and local election districts. Age, sex, and political affiliation (if any) are also recorded. In areas where political parties organize on the basis of neighborhood groups, a field can be inserted to identify these if they are defined in terms of groups of precincts.

The graph below shows the number of registered voters and the number of votes cast by sex and party as percentages of total registrations and votes for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District.

Similar representations can be made by age group, sex by age group, or age group by sex. Any of these can be done statewide or by

  • Congressional district
  • Any state legislative district
  • County
  • Precinct
  • Any other jurisdiction that can be created with these groups

The graph below represents the same data splits as the graph above. This time, however, the area is Polk County. Polk is by far the most populous of the 21 counties that make up Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District. It accounts for approximately 61 percent of registered voters in the district and approximately 61 percent of district votes cast in the 2024 general election.

In both Polk County and the 3rd Congressional District, Democrats are dependent upon female voters and Republicans are dependent upon male voters. Both of these groups are significantly more likely to vote than any other groups depicted in the graphs.

Also apparent is the size of the independent group. In the 3rd Congressional District, Independents are the largest registered voter block. In Polk County, they are the second largest block. Independents do not turn out at the same rates as Republicans and Democrats, but the potential size of the block means it has significant impacts on elections.

We can take the voter results derived from the Iowa Voter Registration Database and blend them with candidate results from the Official Canvass by County and Precinct Results by County to get a pretty good estimate of the number of Independents who voted for candidates of either party. Without accounting for undervotes (registrants that voted in the election but did not vote in this contest) or overvotes (registrants that voted for too many candidates in this contest and, thus, had their votes voided), we can roughly estimate that 47.5% of voting Independents voted for the Democratic candidate for congress and 44.4% voted for the Republican candidate in the race for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District seat. In Polk County, 51.2% voted for the Democratic candidate and 41.8% voted for the Republican candidate in the race. In neither area do the totals sum to 100%. Accounting for overvotes and undervotes (which could be done with available data) would push up all of these percentages. It is also nearly certain that some Independents (as well as some Republicans and Democrats) placed write-in votes for unlisted candidates.

This work is ongoing as inquiries for election analysis come in. Regional Strategic, Ltd. has the data in-house to work on 2024 general election results for Iowa. Data for other states can be obtained. Analysis is possible by age, sex, political affiliation and region to the extent that any individual state’s database will support.

Interested in Learning More About Regional Strategic, Ltd.? Send Us a Message