It’s been two weeks since Election Day. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that 47 openly nontheist or humanist candidates were elected into office this year. In this post I show where they are, their religious identification, and how all the candidates that were endorsed in this cycle fared.
The maps are the continuation of my project scraping the bios of candidates in the Freethought Equality Fund website. I previously ran some preliminary analysis just with the candidates running in the General Election.
Each dot in the maps represents one candidate. WordPress doesn’t allow me to embed the maps well. Click on the map picture and you will be able to scroll through the dots. They have the following information:
- Name
- Office the candidate was seeking
- State
- Election outcome
- Secular Identity
The dots are both colored: Green represents local offices, orange representstate legislative offices, and purple represents federal legislative offices. The darker the shade, the higher the office, for exmaple, light orange is used for US House candidates and dark orange is used for US Senate candidates. The dots also vary in size, the smallest dot represents local (board of education) candidates, the largest dot represents US Senate candidates.
One last thing about secular identity. As I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, I simplified the identities of the candidates because many had very complex ones (see also Hemant’s post about the candidates before Election Day) .My broad categories are:
- Secular/Humanist: Secular or humanist (or secular humanist)
- Non believer: includes atheist, agnostic, non-theist, non-believer
- Not religious: Includes nones, not religious, not practicing a religion, spiritual but not religious
- Did not state: Person did not specify if thy had a religious preference
- Religious ally: A person who identifies with a religion
Those who identify with both a religion and a secular identity are classified as secular.
Map 1: All Candidates
Map 2: Winning Candidates Only
Let me know what you think of the maps in the comments. I will be releasing more analysis as I continue cleaning the data.
