Hey everyone, apologies if I'm completely clueless-- very new here.
I'm a student and right now I'm examining recent presidential elections through the lens of party affiliation. I've been trying to find breakdowns of which voters chose which nominee for each general election, i.e. 85% of registered Democratic voters chose their party's nominee, registered Independents broke 70-30 for the Republican and Democratic sides respectively. I've been searching for a while but I'm realizing this type of data may not even be collected. Any help is appreciated.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you would need to use exit polls for that (if they are available). Some states have open primaries, or possibly semi-open where indies can vote in each, so you have to factor that into the totals. But for states with closed primaries, you can rely on the data for each particular party.
I'm specifically looking for data on general presidential elections, so Trump v. Clinton, Obama v. Romney/McCain, Bush v. Gore etc. I'm not worried about data from primaries for right now.
As Virginia said, you need to look at exit polls for this data, not actual statistics. Thankfully, the government doesn't keep stats on how Republicans or Democrats voted in any given election. There is no way for them to know - my ballot is secret. Some states don't even have party registration, but that's a whole other subject.
Dave doesn't map polls by county. Google "2016 exit poll", etc, instead.
