What Does Today’s Key Voter Look Like?
October 18, 2016 — The 2016 presidential race has certainly been unlike any other election season in recent memory.
In previewing this year’s campaign, Infogroup is taking a data-driven approach to answer the following questions:
1. Where do Republicans and Democrats tend to work?
2. What is the profile of a typical Republican or Democrat household?
Infogroup merged voter registration data from critical swing states with its own unique business, consumer and ExecuReach1 data to better understand where Republicans and Democrats work, what their households look like and how their lifestyle interests differ. The analysis included battleground states for this year’s election, such as Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio.
Where Do Republicans & Democrats Work?
To answer the first question, we merged Infogroup’s voter registration data with Infogroup’s unique ExecuReach database that combines business and consumer data. When these two sources were combined, we ended up with a sample of more than 5 million individuals with their party affiliation and place of employment.
Democrats are more likely to work in larger businesses, as they’re 29 percent more likely to work at a company with at least 500 employees than Republicans are. Also, Democrats are 30 percent more likely to work at the greenest businesses in the country. On the other hand, Republicans are 24 percent more likely than Democrats to own a business.
What Do Republican and Democrat Households Look Like?
To create profiles of today’s Democratic and Republican households, we merged the voter registration data with our consumer database, giving us a sample of more than 33 million households. There are some noticeable differences across party lines, but these differences are also dependent on whether the household is a single adult or has multiple adults.2
In general, Republicans tend to have stronger financial indicators like higher household income, home value, net worth, and likelihood to invest3, as well as a higher percentage of college graduates than Democrats. Likewise, multiple-adult households in either party also tend to be more financially secure and more likely to be college graduates than single-person households.
Percentage of College Graduates by Affiliation & Household Size
Median Household Income by Affiliation & Household Size
For example, single-adult Democrat households have a median income of $32K, single-adult Republican households $45K, multiple-adult Democrat households $67K, and multiple-adult Republican households $90K.
Financial Indicators by Party Affiliation and Household Type
Lifestyle Interests
Beyond just looking at a demographic profile of both parties, we analyzed lifestyle interests5 and found the following differences:
For questions regarding this study please email corporate.communications@infogroup.com. To download the full report click here.
1 Execureach is Infogroup’s blended database of business executives at the office and at home, consisting of the business demographic data of the executive’s place of work and his/her consumer demographics.
2 If multiple adults have different party affiliations, the household is classified according to the affiliation of the head of the household. In cases where the head of household is unaffiliated, then the household’s classification will depend on the other adults in the household.
3 Likelihood to invest is measured by Infogroup’s proprietary Potential Investment Consumer model, which ranks households from 1 (most likely) to 20 (least likely) according to their likelihood to make aggressive financial investments. “Aggressive investors” are considered to be households with scores of 1-6.
4 Consumer Stability Index (CSI) is Infogroup’s proprietary score which provides a relative ranking of economic stability for all households in the consumer database and ranges from 0 (least stable) to 100 (most stable).
5 Lifestyle interests are measured as the percent of one segment displaying a particular interest relative to another segment. For example, if 50 percent of one segment displays a given interest and 40 percent of the other segment has the same interest, the first segment is 0.2 times more likely (or 20 percent more likely) to have that interest. Each lifestyle interest is indicated by the percent of each segment that have scores of 7-9 on selected TargetReady models. TargetReady Models are a series of pre-developed consumer behavior or attitudinal models. Households are scored on a scale of 0 (lowest) to 9 (highest).
