We’ve been curious about voting patterns from communities that have built their own networks so we took our community broadband networks map and analyzed some election data. A substantial majority of communities that have built their own networks vote Republican.
We decided to stick with the citywide networks, where a community has taken the greatest risk in building a citywide FTTH or cable network. This gave us more than 100 communities to analyze. We looked at the Presidential elections from 2008 and 2012 as well as the House election from 2012. This was to guard against any anomalies from a single election or type of election.
Some 3 out of 4 communities have voted Republican in recent elections, a trend that has become more pronounced across these elections. And as elections in non-presidential years tend to skew more conservative, we would expect the results to show an even greater trend toward voting for Republicans.
With President Obama speaking out in support of community networks, it will be interesting to see how Republicans in the Senate and House react. Some Republicans have taken strong stances to limit local authority in favor of states interfering in local matters like how to ensure businesses have high quality Internet access.
But at the local level, this is an issue of jobs and education, not one of a rigid ideology. We’ve noted in the past how local Republicans and Democrats have fought side by side on these matters. But last year, National Journal traced the growth of partisanship on municipal networks at the federal level.
In this analysis, we counted each community as one vote. Chattanooga, with its large population counts the same as tiny Windom, Minnesota. We analyzed the data in two different ways to ensure that clusters of municipal networks didn’t bias the results. Some districts have multiple municipal networks within them, so we first considered every community to have one vote and then we separately considered just every district that has a network. This means that if a district had 5 municipal networks, in one analysis it would count 5 times and in the other, it would only count once. The results were very similar so we just show the pie charts where every community is included.