Introduction Every four years, the United States presidential election becomes one of the country’s biggest news stories for a large chunk of that year. During this time there are a great many words both spoken and written about how people are going to vote and what factors supposedly lead them to vote a certain way. It seems that much of the time the analysis of these issues is of a qualitative nature, and with that in mind this paper will attempt to approach the problem from a statistical point of view. That is not to say there is a lack of quantitative research on how specific demographics tend to vote; indeed, some of the good data and information out there will be used to inform this paper’s hypotheses and econometric model. This study will focus on the 2012 U.S. presidential election Barack Obama and Mitt Romney (there were several other candidates on the ballot, but none received a significant portion of the votes). Pundits threw around seemingly countless factors in an attempt to analyze and predict how people would vote in this election; this paper will focus on a select group of those factors, in hopes of drawing some firm and well-grounded conclusions as to whether they actually played a statistically significant role. Countywide data will be utilized. The recent widespread availability of election results on a county-by-county level, combined with countywide information from the U.S. Census Bureau, allows for a very large number of observations (at least in comparison to statewide data) to be considered. It would be impossible to include in this project every single factor that may affect how an individual votes for the presidency. Here, instead of focusing on attributes of the candidates that potentially affect how people vote, the spotlight will predominantly be on certain attributes of the voters. Specifically, the following demographics