Do Republicans love little dogs? Do Democrats go wild for designer breeds? Rover.com dug into its data and compared it with election data from the 2012 presidential election to determine the reddest and bluest dogs across America.
A quick note on methodology: In a nutshell, our analyst compiled 2012 election data, assigned a blue or red designation for metropolitan areas based on Obama/Romney/other votes, then cross-referenced that data with the Rover.com database of dog breeds and dog names to determine the reddest and bluest breeds and names. For more details on our methodology, see below. Here are some of our findings, with a beautiful infographic below!
Democrat Dog Breeds
- Poodle
- Maltese
- Yorkshire terrier
Republican Dog Breeds
- Border collie
- Boxer
- Australian shepherd
Independent Dog Breeds
- American pit bull terrier
- Dachshund
- Siberian husky
Methodology:
Wanna geek out with us? Here’s how we crunched the numbers:
We compiled election data by county for each of the 3,845 counties in the USA using the 2012 presidential election. Approximately 123 million votes cast were split into Obama, Romney, and other, with the percentage of the county’s total calculated for each.
Election data for counties that are part of a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) was rolled up at the MSA level. Then the difference between the blue and red share of the vote in each MSA was calculated. Negative numbers result for metro areas that skewed blue and positive numbers for red.
To determine popular dog breeds, queries were run on the Rover database to obtain a count of dogs registered on the site grouped by breed and county. Counties were rolled up into total breed counts for each MSA. This data was analyzed to arrive at a list of the top five most popular breeds for each MSA.
To determine popular names, queries were run on the Rover database to obtain a count of dogs registered on the site grouped by name and county. Since the list of possible names is much larger than the list of possible breeds, each MSA was assigned as either “red” (over 5 percentage point spread in favor of Romney) or “blue” (over 5 percentage point spread in favor of Obama). The names were then ranked by popularity across all red and blue MSAs as a whole to determine the 500 most popular dog names in red and blue metro areas, respectively.
