***Maybe everyone who is crunching the numbers already knows about this site but then again maybe not.... sorry if its a dupe.****
http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu/ROAD /
*****This is a huge data set on prior elections which is (if I understand it correctly) geographically located for each voting area down to cities and precincts, which also lists socioeconomic data and demographic factors for either precincts or slightly larger areas. I see this could be useful for those who are seeking to debunk the myth that certain areas split their vote or other questions we may need answered. When using this be careful to read the notes on the data as they clearly point out small errors in the data.************
The Record of American Democracy
by Gary King - Bradley Palmquist
Published in PS: Political Science and Politics and Sociological Methods and Research
A massive new aggregate data set on American politics is now available. Our Record Of American Democracy (ROAD) data include election returns, socioeconomic summaries, and demographic measures of the American public at unusually low levels of geographic aggregation. The NSF-supported ROAD project covers every state in the country from 1984 through 1990 (including some off-year elections). One collection of data sets includes every election at and above State House, along with party registration and other variables, in each state for the roughly 170,000 precincts nationwide (about 60 times the number of counties). Another collection has added to these (roughly 30-40) political variables an additional 3,725 variables merged from the 1990 U.S. Census for 47,327 aggregate units (about 15 times the number of counties) about the size one or more cities or towns. These units completely tile the U.S. landmass. This collection also includes geographic boundary files so users can easily draw maps with these data.
We find it remarkable that the electoral record of the world's leading democracy is routinely lost or discarded. Election returns in the U.S. are collected by precinct and passed on to county offices in every state. In these county offices, the official electoral record then gets stuffed under desks, recycled, occasionally put into archives, or most often discarded. For the first time, a substantial piece of the entire electoral record of American democracy has been preserved. We hope someone (or our elected officials) takes on the task of institutionalizing the formal preservation of this record. For now, we hope the scientific community will take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity.
The ROAD data represent an opportunity for political scientists, geographers, quantitative historians, sociologists, and others to learn about electoral behavior, the political characteristics of local community context, electoral geography, the role of minority groups in elections and legislative redistricting, split ticket voting and divided government, elections under federalism, and numerous other topics of central importance to many disciplines.