SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF VOTES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ACCORDING TO SELECTED DEMOGRAPHIC INDICATORS - AN EXAMPLE OF US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

Electoral Geography as part of political geography has not been significantly represented as a subject of research in Croatia and neighboring countries, and there is, in particular, a shortage of papers that deal with the in depth analysis of the spatial components of elections. Therefore, the subject of this paper is an analysis of certain demographic indicators or factors and their impact on the spatial distribution of votes in US presidential elections, in the period from 2004 until the last elections in 2016. The selected include racial structure, emphasized in this paper, age-gender structure and urban-rural differences. Analysis has shown that some of the mentioned factors have a greater impact on spatial distribution of votes, having in mind that the racial structure is the starting point for observing spatial distribution of votes and is hierarchically superior to the other observed factors. People of the same racial origin generally have similar voting preferences, and the other factors mostly depend on that factor.