The purpose of this analysis is to look at the political positions of US senators in a geospatial method.
Typically, US politics is thought of in a two dimensional framework, with politicians being liberal/conservative on both social and economic issues. However, with the realignment brought on by the Trump Administration, there has been a movement toward isolationism and protectionist policies that don't fit traditional economic conservatism.
I wanted to include this "third dimension" of globalism/isolationism and how existing US Senators fit in that model. Using geospatial analysis of voting records, I could see how close Senators were to each other and cluster them in groups.
The three dimensions are:
- Fiscal issues, which I represented through the Club for Growth score. Note that I had to invert the score because higher meant more conservative.
- Social issues, which I represented through the ACLU score.
- Global issues, which I represented through the NumbersUSA score. NumbersUSA advocates for lower immigration to the US, so I had to invert the score to make it progressive.
I gathered this data manually then plotted it using the scatter3D function within the matplotlib library. I then used Ben Alex Keen's writeup to manually find the clusters.
Enjoy, and feel free to reach out with any comments or questions.