A post-election story by the Observer matched precinct results with 1990 census data to show how the swing away from George Bush in North Carolina was more pronounced in cities and suburbs. Bush support in state urban and suburban areas dropped since 1988 by more than 15 percentage points, compared with a 13.6 point drop across rural areas, according to the study. The Observer also used census data to analyze election returns for four groups of precincts, each group dominated by people with similar education, occupations and household income.
The study showed Bush lost support among upper-income voters, mostly executives and professionals, and that most of those votes went to Perot. The votes Bush lost among middle-class voters were more likely to go to Clinton. For this precinct analysis story, the Observer started with block-group level figures on income and education, then used Atlas GIS to make precinct-level estimates and SPSSPC to search for data patterns and to create precinct groups.
The paper used dBASE to relate demographic class with precinct vote results.