Estimated votes by county among non-blacks
November 18th, 2008, by Andrew
Ben Lauderdale writes:
I [Ben] had this map [see below] on my door for the last week. Based on exactly the same calculation using constant 95% black support and census-proportional representation. The white counties are the ones whose census names didn’t match properly with the names used in the library(maps) package in R, I was too lazy to fix them.
Cool. I’d only suggest using light gray rather than heavy black lines between counties; the map as it is overemphasizes the county borders, I think. But I respect his laziness; there’s always time later to fix the details.
Ben continues:
[Below are] the state-by-state county share plots for the lower 49, Obama vote share as a function of black population share. V.O. Key’s observation that whites who live near blacks in southern states are less positively inclined towards them is *still* visible in several states.
The circle areas are proportional to county voter turnout. (The biggest circle is L.A. county in California, and so forth.)
Ben also had this comment about his map:
It reminded me of something Bob Putnam would say every time someone presented an empirical talk in our Center for the Study of Democratic Politics series during the year he was a fellow here at Princeton: “You should include miles to the Canadian border as a variable in your regression, it is the most important proxy for political culture in America!” At least in the eastern half of the country, he has a point.
Except for New Hampshire and Vermont, I think.
P.S. Further discussion here of graphing possibilities.
Similar Posts:
- Race, region, and Obama
- Big city Barack
- Confusion about the changing positions of political parties in the U.S.
- More on the swing in the House vote
- Red Blue at NYU
6 Comments
Add your own1. Robert Kern | November 18th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
While we’re nitpicking on color choices, can I add that as a color blind person, I find the “Red-Purple-Blue” colormap increasingly used for these maps to be difficult to read? Nominally, I’m red-green colorblind, but I’ve always had problems distinguishing shades of dark blues and purples.
I understand the internal logic (and occasional agenda) behind the colormap, but wouldn’t a “Red-White-Blue” colormap like ColorBrewer’s RdBu work better for interpreting the data? The 50% midpoint is easier to locate, and the sizes of small deviations from the center are easier to estimate.
2. The South, still exceptio&hellip | November 18th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
[...] With yet more graphs. And a map! [...]
3. Matt Weiner | November 18th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
The sidebar is eating the county share plots — can you include a link to them on a separate page or something? I want to see Delaware’s three counties.
4. JP Stormcrow | November 18th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
The next step that I would like to see would be the (estimated) difference between ‘04 and ‘08 shares for the Dem candidate for the same demographic.
5. Joseph j7uy5 | November 19th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Matt W: You can see the whole graphic by right-clicking and selecting “view image”
That will open the picture by itself in a new window or tab.
6. 19 November 2008 « &hellip | November 19th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
[...] Yet another cool political map: red/blue/purple by county, with the African American vote thrown out. As usual, there is the caveat that some counties are [...]
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