I have been working with the 2020 ANES dataset and would like to share my report on Exploratory Analysis with the 2020 ANES Pre-election Survey. This report may be useful for three different audiences: 1) researchers seeking to use the ANES dataset in their work but feeling intimidated by its massive structure and the dearth of resources available on the web for using R with survey data, 2) R programmers interested in general purpose tabulation and data visualization, and 3) anyone with an interest in the differences between Biden voters and Trump voters in the months ahead of the 2020 election. This report is largely a tab deck, but also includes some of my introductory notes and a smattering of thoughts about how to approach some of the variables. All the code to generate the report is available in the HTAD repository on Github.

In the preparatory work for a tutorial series I’m developing called How to Analyze Data, I’ve been on the hunt for example datasets that are rich, clean, freely available, substantively interesting, and a variety of variables that would support a lot of exploration and serve as very practical for teaching purposes. I decided on the 2020 American National Election Studies because this dataset meets all these criteria. There is so much to learn here and I’m excited to explore it in more detail.