Codebook for U.S. House Returns 2020

The data file district-overall-2020 contains constituency (district) returns for elections to the U.S. House of Representatives from 2020. The data source is the document “Statistics of the Congressional Election,” published biennially by the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. 2018 data comes from official state election websites, and for Kansas, come from Stephen Pettigrew and the Kansas Secretary of State office (in some cases, they are marked as unofficial, and will be updated at a later time).

All string variables are in upper case.

Variables

The variables are listed as they appear in the data file.

year

• Description: year in which election was held

state

• Description: state name

state_po

• Description: U.S. postal code state abbreviation

state_fips

• Description: State FIPS code

state_cen

• Description: U.S. Census state code

state_ic

• Description: ICPSR state code

office

• Description: U.S. House (constant)

district

• Description: district number
• ****Note****: At-large districts are coded as 0 (zero).

stage

• Description: electoral stage
• Coding:

• Note: Only appears in special cases. Consult original House Clerk report for these cases.

special

• Description: special election
• Coding

candidate

• Description: name of the candidate
• Note: The name is as it appears in the House Clerk report.

party

• Description: party of the candidate (always entirely lowercase)
  • Note: Parties are as they appear in the House Clerk report. In states that allow candidates to appear on multiple party lines, separate vote totals are indicated for each party. Therefore, for analysis that involves candidate totals, it will be necessary to aggregate across all party lines within a district. For analysis that focuses on two-party vote totals, it will be necessary to account for major party candidates who receive votes under multiple party labels. Minnesota party labels are given as they appear on the Minnesota ballots. Future versions of this file will include codes for candidates who are endorsed by major parties, regardless of the party label under which they receive votes.

writein

• Description: vote totals associated with write-in candidates
• Coding:

mode

• Description: mode of voting; states with data that doesn’t break down returns by mode are marked as “total”

candidatevotes

• Description: votes received by this candidate for this particular party

totalvotes

• Description: total number of votes cast for this election

fusion_ticket

• Description: A TRUE/FALSE indicator as to whether the given candidate is running on a fusion party ticket, which will in turn mean that a candidate will appear multiple times, but by different parties, for a given election. States with fusion tickets include Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and South Carolina.

unofficial

• Description: TRUE/FALSE indicator for unofficial result (to be updated later); this appears only for 2018 data in some cases

version

• Description: date when this dataset was finalized