Introduction
Political affiliation by today’s standards is truly stirring discussion amongst people around the United States. My project is finding the relationship between the amount of money donated to the Maine State Seminary and the political affiliation of the person or people. Beyond discovering the correlation and graphing the many ways this information may be portrayed, it is crucial to understand the contextual factors of this discussion. Furthermore, when analyzing the relationship between affiliation and donations, it is crucial to recognize the qualities and values emphasized within each political group. The discussion of where income should be devoted towards, taxes being distributed, and social injustices is what genuinely fluctuates based on the political ideology of one’s self. Within the data I have, the votes consist of the political parties in the range of 1854 to 1857 from the Democrat vote, Republican, Whig, and Prohibition Party.
Data Discussion
The data that I decided to collect ranges from the specific names of Maine State Seminary donors to recorded county votes within a .csv file with counties as rows, and columns as the number of votes for a particular party in a particular election. Due to the lack of knowledge we have on each specific person that donated (the direct political party each person represents) I made the executive decision to take the majority of votes per major city in the given counties and associate it with the person of that specific location. While this process will not give exact results for the year 1855, (the year of immediate donations to the Maine State Seminary) it will provide a valid visualization of what is a very possible graph.
This data was collected through a series of filtering accomplished with my classmates, reaching out for outside resources with the help of Dr. Shrout, our teacher, and also the journal article titled ‘Maine and The Elections of 1860’. I decided to only use the results of the year 1855 because it will shape and clean up the overall data that I would like to solely focus on. With this in mind, I merged the two data sets that I used to create a table that would include the county of the people that donated, the amount that was donated, and the presumed political affiliation of the provided cities. I looked at the major cities within each provided county on the .csv with voting results and converted those numbers into Democrat or Republican based on results. The other two political groups at the time were not as active and politics were beginning to narrow down between Democrat or Republican. What is extremely fascinating to see is the significant amount of Republican voters around the state of Maine when it is currently known as a “purple” state.
What this information can help solve or explain is the historic transition of Republican voters to Democratic voters due to the immense amount of Republican donors to the Maine State Seminary. Although this fact is eye-opening at first, It is important to not immediately arrive at conclusions. There are a plethora of historic and social factors that have led to the shift in the theme of “generosity” but when looking at the data of 1855 alone, this is what we are looking for.
The data that I configured into solving the general correlation and plotting multiple graphs shows the estimated value of the Democratic party compared to the Republican party donations to the Maine State Seminary. This data is relevant to not only Bates College but is more importantly a reference to understanding historic contributions and understanding that fluidity is something that will always be constant. Before taking on this project, I did not understand the political views in the late 19th Century and the role that it played within the specific location of Maine. The data that is below is a genuine estimation of how political affiliation is represented within the 1855 Maine State Seminary.
Coding Processes
This is the new spreadsheet that includes the political affiliation of each person that resides in a major city within the given recorded counties from the .csv. By merging the data I was able to find two variables that are comparable instead of immediately comparing political affiliation and donation value.
At first, my initial goal was to present the differences through a bar graph or scatter plot, but after analysis, I realized that this graph was not sufficient and that a heat map would portray my new data in a better way.
Context and Conclusion
After understanding the time circumstances of accomplishing this project, I realized that answering a question of one’s political affiliation and donation amount is something that is extremely difficult to thoroughly accomplish. What is being presented here is a heat graph that solely estimates what the results may portray. It is crucial to understand that presenting a graph like this and claiming it as the full narrative of 1855’s Maine State Seminary political donation results is not ethical. I would one day love to accomplish this project and allow it to shape what is perceived about political affiliation and donations.
