[Update: Author Cosma Shalizi points out that they had an error in their program, and the effect I point out in the post was an artifact. Oh, well – another beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact. Compliments to Cosma for getting the correction out so quickly.]
Via Crooked Timber, I’m indirectly taken to this page of cartograms on the election results by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman.
It’s fascinating (and beautiful).
Here’s the money quote, though:
Of course, we know that nationwide the percentages of voters voting for either candidate were almost identical, so what is going on here?
The answer is that there were very few counties in which most people voted for the Republican candidate, but there were many in which most people voted for the Democrat. Put another way, the amount of red on the map is skewed because there are many counties in which only a slim majority voted Republican; there were substantially fewer counties in which a slim majority voted Democrat.
As an example, leaving out for the moment voters who voted for third-party candidates, the number of counties in the US in which more than 99% of voters voted Republican was five (out of 4533). The number of counties in which more than 99% of voters voted Democrat was 307.
There’s a histogram on this up at Three-Toed Sloth, go look at it right now…it shows a fairly normal curve, with a huge spike at the 100% Democratic level.
I don’t have time to sift election data and find the 307 counties where 99% percent voted Democratic, but I’m willing to bet that they included areas where the political and media leadership of the country live.
Welcome to the ‘bubble’, folks. If this is right, it’s physical as well as informational.
AL
Your link “This Page of Cartograms” yields a 403 forbidden error message.
Hmmm…we have one just like it here at the lab, and it works fine for us!
Seriously, I get right through. Can you try again?
A.L.
Hasn’t worked for me over the last several tries.
I can’t open it either. 403 error.
Guys, I’m puzzled. Works fine for me in IE and Firefox. Here’s the “url”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
A.L.
It still seems to be down, but you can get to a mirror through Three-Toed Sloth.
I’d suggest this shows that Democrats are simply better at election fraud than Republicans are.
It’s entertaining but irrelevant since we don’t allocate electoral votes by cartogram and probably won’t in the foreseeable future. Insofar as it makes Democrats feel complacent in their urban strongholds it may even be damaging.
“Three Toed Sloth mirror version”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/election/
312 counties claim that over 99% of their voters agree on who should be President? And I’m supposed to believe there is no fraud involved?
This effort by Gastner et. al. is rather nice; it was a close election, which their cartogram elucidates better than the USA Today map. However, the US is a nation of places, not just people. It looks to me like this is just an attempt to make themselves feel better after their candidate lost.
Ben Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for lunch. Liberty is when the sheep has a rifle.” The electoral college & the senate are the rifle for the smaller states. The map is pretty, but does not reflect the political power of each jurisdiction.
I don’t have time to sift election data and find the 307 counties where 99% percent voted Democratic, but I’m willing to bet that they included areas where most of the people live off of government money. And I’ll bet the other 5 counties were dominated by people who live off the money Daddy left them.
*Mapping the bubble – more spin?*
Here’s the problem I have with the new map. Basically it gives each individual county / state a proportional area. IE if county A is this size with this many people then county B should be this size because it has twice as many people as County A. Unfortunately that’s not how it works folks. Yes the vote was “51% Bush – 48% Kerry”:http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/ with a difference of 3,510,358 votes. These numbers are not based on the total tally as some counties did not report outstanding provisional and absentee ballots due to mathematical impossibilities of one candidate winning over the other even if they were counted. How would counting these ballots alter the overall percentages and difference? Until they are counted it is mere speculation.
So what does the map really tell us? It tells us that there are just as many people living in rural areas combined than there are as many people living in combined metropolitan areas. Lets face it not everyone lives in a major city or even wants to. Hop a few puddle jumpers and you know exactly what I’m talking about. The number of counties doesn’t matter. The number of states doesn’t matter. The area occupied by the people doesn’t matter. What matters are the district / county / state lines in relevance to senatorial / congressional representation and the “electoral”:http://www.electoral-vote.com/ votes to be cast by the “electoral college.”:http://www.fec.gov/pages/ecworks.htm The total number of electoral votes are squarely in favor of those states that have huge populations. It should also be noted that the number of representatives is determined from the census that is taken every 10 years. So if you have never participated in a census you are in effect casting a null vote. In other words you may have been that 30,000th person “(Article I Section 2 clause 3)”:http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html that would have given your state one more representative which would increase the electoral count by one for your state. How the electoral votes are cast for each candidate is determined by individual state laws. Most states require the electors vote in total for the candidate chosen by popular vote. There are some states that do split their electoral votes giving an edge to the popular vote of the state. I’ll not debate the electoral college in this thread as I feel it deserves consideration in a thread devoted solely to that subject.
What I will say here though is trying to map the bubble in any meaningful manner is doing nothing but playing games.
Over at my site I’ve got an interesting table right now that shows the states, who carried them, the federal expenditures per tax dollar, the per capita income, and the Gini coefficient for each state. Bush carried a lot more states that were net tax beneficiaries than Kerry. And Kerry carried the richer states. It’s a lot more complicated than it’s being made out to be.
AL
Sorry for the late response – I may well have blocked it out myself with IE security settings and my personal firewall. If others can get to it then it’s my security measures at work. I did manage to get to it by means of the other links you provided and following those chains.
21% of Dem counties were won by <5%.
6% of Rep counties were won by <5%.
The most democrat demographic in the country is blacks. In 2000, they voted 92% democrat. In 2004 they voted more like 88% democrat.
There is no combination of demographic groups that will give you a higher overall percentage than that, though there will certainly be some outliers in the mid to upper 90s. Not, however, in more than half the counties the democrats won.
Those vote totals, consequently, are highly suspect. Ascribe your own explanation and motives.
Compare to _very_ republican Utah at <75% republican.
I think the most important thing that these various weighted cartographs show us is that it is still true that no one (from either party) can win a U.S. presidential election only by mobilizing their base. You must win a significant part of the country and a substantial number of voters who are up for grabs in every election.
It is still a race to the middle. The reason that it tends not to look like a race to the middle to the progressive base is that they don’t really have a handle on where the middle is. Note that for example lots of people who voted for Kerry had to have voted for one of the gay marriage bans. Every single one of them received more votes than the President did in that state!! Like it or not (and I don’t particularly) this is not a Republican base issue. Until the (self-described) progressive wing of the Democratic Party realizes this, they really will have electoral trouble.
Unfortunately for the three of us, the almost-all-Kerry counties did not, in fact, exist; the program which produced that histogram had a bug, and when we corrected it, the effect went away, and we got an ordinary-looking bell curve. (Oops.)
Our map was made with a different program, which doesn’t have that bug, and is (so far as we can test) correct.
If anyone wants to look at our data, get in touch and I’ll be happy to share it.
99%?? Crapola. That’s Saddam Hussein kind of numbers. Without looking at the site, I know you or the reporter has misstated the statistics.
OK, now I’ve looked at the site. Nary a percentage to be seen. Damn, innumeracy bugs me. >:-(
Maps like this just make me wonder why we are viewing the electorate in this red state/ blue state metaphor. Its the same as it ever was:
Urban 54% Kerry / 45% Bush
Suburban 52% Bush / 47% Kerry
Rural 57% Bush / 42% Kerry
Nationally, 46% of voters live in suburbs. Key battleground states are even more suburban: Ohio (49%), Pennsylvania (65%), and Florida (61%)
Patrick
That’s strange. Only 99%? I’m going to have to talk to my people.
I fully understood the point of those maps, the math behind it etc… all it did for me was remind me why the electoral college is so superior.
Another thing that impressed me is how the distortions it imposed on the geography, how it purverted the view of the landscape all out of porportion could represent the twisted distorted reality of the leftist indoctrinated brain, another explanation how that fanatical egalitarian religion could shrug off the mountain of death the planks of the communist manifesto create when put into practice.
Another angle of this warped perception can be seen in their art,
” At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following “Current Communist Goals,” which she identifies as an excerpt from “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen ”
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
From http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
Remmeber the sack of garbage that was (un)mistaken for garbage and thrown out by the night janitor ?
As a guide to the purversion, both moral and mental, of what they call thought, its quite instructive to look at the collection of festering stinking revolting projectile vomit causing expressions they call art.
Now that sodomy is main street, guess whats comming folks, in just a few years the “act up” in your face,, todays frisco gay parade will be refelcted back upon as part of the era of self restraint.
Dismiss Singer and all the others introducing the ethos of Adult child sex, but they are the illuminati of those that control the democrat party, we have seen some admissions that they must “get our kooks off the front porch” but that ignores the fact that for those in power they are not seen as kooks, M Moore sitting next to Carter is interchangable with Peter Singer, they would see nothing wrong with him, indeed he gets awards, and this is nothing new.
Walter Durranty got a pulotzer Prize for helping Stalin murder 10 Million in the Ukrane in the 30’s and is still listed @ The New York Times.
And Yasser Arafat got the peace prize after leaving a trail of blood. pushing people in wheel chairs off the deck of cruise ships and generaly leaving a trail of murder going back to the Murder of Jews at the olympics.
In other words, right and wrong is totaly inverted, the obcene and is heralded as good and given awards while the good is spit opon and given a littany of smears for daring to object, refusing to endorse this orwellian inversion of good and evil.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
Go ahead and read the whole thing, this came from a book written by an FBI agent, who infiltrated the CPUSA and other groups and informed us about those that acted under the direction of the KGB.
Look at John Kerry, captured Veitcong documents prove he was acting as an agent of the Veitcong under direction of the paris delegation.
His 20 year history shows a hostility to american defense and support aid and confort to Communist tyrannies guilty of crimes against humanity.
These are facts, they are true, and will stand up in a court of law.
In this light, that leaves only three types of democrats, Communist traitors, Usefull Idiots, and those fighting the leftist invasion of the party.
Zell Miller might be the only one left of the resisters to the leftist invasion, as for the others, you cant say those with more sense than Bagdad McDermot are any different than he or Kerry, only that they are better at hiding their Commie colors. but things are certainly blown too wide open to excuse many for “Usefull Idiot”cy.
Btw, WWII hero tailgunner Joe McCarthy, who railed loudly at the commie menace that created the most incomrehensable mountain of murdered innocents, worse than the NAZI’s by a factor of almost 10 ( measured in helpless innocents killed) has been Utterly Totaly and completely vindicated.
We did indeed have spys in the state department, we did indeed have commie propagandist in Hollywood (still there) and in the news media (still there) and taking control of our universities (in utter total control of all but a bare few of them)
We now know that not only was McCarthy correct, but that he wasnt even fully aware of how bad it was even as the whole horrible scope of worldwide leftist opression and death was just beginning to become clear to a few.
One of the most bandied phrases of conventional wisdom has been turned on its head, you would think that was news eh ?
Think about it.
AL
just a little more map-grist – check out this map from WaPo,
http://www.speakeasy.org/~milnor/where.jpg
which is totally great just in terms of its visual representation of information – it’s got the red and blue counties broken down, but it also shows them elevated more or less according to the margin of victory. this is an aspect of the data already touched on in the links you list and in the comments, but it’s really striking to see – you’ve got broad support for Bush with a few small peaks, but the Kerry supporters are a couple of tiny blue islands with MASSIVE ‘towers’ of voters in LA, Manhattan, Chicago, and Philadelphia. there’s an analogy to ‘ivory tower’ academics somewhere out there…