Ballistic Missiles and Democratic Vote Shares

A while back, I was asked to find an exogenous predictor of popular support for Kennedy’s Moonshot program.1 Specifically, we wanted to isolate the causal effect of public R&D funding on voting outcomes (both Gallup and federal election votes in favour of the Democrats) at the county level. Consider this simple regression to test that effect: The Moonshot program refers to President John F.…