How The Vehicle You Buy Predicts Who You'll Vote For

Here we have data on the best-selling vehicles by state in 2014, and how those states voted in the last election. Basically, this indicates a correlation between the popularity of trucks and voting Republican. But I think it looks more like trucks are taking over America.

Here's break-down of which states had a truck line as their top selling vehicle this year, and which trucks those were:

The percentage indicates how many people bought trucks over everything else in 2014.

Now, of course we know that truck sales reporting is basically bullshit as far as comparing to other models. That "Ford F-Series" number accounts for the F-150, F-250, F-350, and as of 2015, the pick-up variant of the F-450. Ram and GM are guilty of the same nonsensical sales reporting (lumping several models into one sales figure)... giving them all a ridiculously weighted advantage to rack up "better sales" than non-trucks.

But the information still works to look at how each of the Big Three truck brands are dominating the United States like a game of Risk. Looks like Ford's got quite an empire.

To try and work around the convolution of truck sales data, here's the US divided by which states had more than 50% of new-vehicles in trucks this year (green) versus which had a majority of car sales (yellow). In Nevada, Arizona, and Hawaii, the "best-selling" model was indeed a truck, but cars still represented more than half of those state's new-vehicle sales. To make this as simple as possible, "cars" includes small SUVs like the Honda CR-V and Ford Escape, which topped the sales list in a few places:

And here's how the nation voted in the 2012 presidential election:

The breakdown?

More states buy trucks and voted republican than anything else. John Krafcik, president of TrueCar (the company that compiled all of this information) says this means "Republicans will back in control of the Senate for the first time since 2006" after this November's votes are counted. That sounds like a gross oversimplification, but I suppose we'll see if and how the landscape changes soon enough.

Here's the rundown of which models sold best across the country, according to TrueCar. Including a more complete count-up of which "non-trucks" were represented at the top of the sales heap.

Images by the author with data from TrueCar