Kentucky and Virginia have considerable shared history. Kentucky was part of Virginia until 1792, and most of the earliest European settlers in Kentucky entered the state through the Cumberland Gap, which makes up the border between the two states. Between 1900 and 2004, Kentucky and Virginia voted for the same candidate for President in all but five elections. Since 2008, however, Kentucky and Virginia have been on divergent paths.
In 2008, Virginia cast their electoral votes for then-Senator Barack Obama for President, and has been a solidly “blue” state in Presidential elections ever since.
This is John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s third district Congressman. Since 2012, he’s been the only Democrat in Kentucky’s congressional delegation. Without a doubt, Congressman Yarmuth is the most liberal Kentucky US House Member to have served this century.
While the rest of Kentucky’s delegation has been more conservative than Congressman Yarmuth, I don’t think anyone has ever done any real work to measure the magnitude by which Congressman Yarmuth is the most liberal.
This is John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s third district Congressman. Since 2012, he’s been the only Democrat in Kentucky’s congressional delegation. Without a doubt, Congressman Yarmuth is the most liberal Kentucky US House Member to have served this century.
While the rest of Kentucky’s delegation has been more conservative than Congressman Yarmuth, I don’t think anyone has ever done any real work to measure the magnitude by which Congressman Yarmuth is the most liberal.
The women and men who make up the Kentucky legislature use Twitter often to communicate with themselves, their constituents, and Kentuckians as a whole. I analyzed the tweets of the 112 legislators who use the application for sentiment and usage patterns. It was fun project! I learned a lot and I hope you learn something from my work.
Method!
The Kentucky Legislative Research Commission director, David Byerman, manages a list of all the Kentucky legislators who use the twitter application.
What are we about to do?
Learn the most important idioms for data munging in R
Apply them to an open data example
By the end, I hope you can use these skills to repeat this process with data you find
What Data Are We Using?
Kentucky Department of Education College and Career Readiness Data
Easily Found on their website
Step 1: Load Up Tidyverse and Read In Data
library(tidyverse)
ccr_data <- read_csv('.
Before this year and as far back as anyone can remember, Democrats controlled the Kentucky House of Representatives. Even though no Presidential candidate has carried Kentucky since 1996 and Kentucky has not elected a Democrat to the US Senate since 1992, Democrats in Kentucky have fair better on the state level. However, this ended in 2016, when Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives – what many commenters consider “the last Democratic legislative chamber in the South”.
A few days ago on twitter, I wrote about some work I had done regarding W-Nominate scores and the Kentucky Legislature. I am getting the sense that many people are confused about what exactly W-Nominate is and how it works. So, allow me to try and explain!
What is W-Nominate?
The technical description of W-Nominate, taken directly from their site, is “a scaling procedure that performs parametric unfolding of binary choice data.