Talk Elections

One of my favorite maps to make - New York by township:
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This map is the culmination of compiling all data collected from each county individually (ex NYC where there is only one "town" per county).

In 2004, Bush won 780 municipalities vs. 219 for Kerry.  In 2008, Obama increased the the ratio to 375 to McCain's 626.  Most of the flips are in Upstate suburbs, the North Country (Northern Adirondacks and Quebec border) and the Catskill region.  My home county of Onondaga saw 9 flips alone - with only four small towns ("Southern Tier") staying in the Republican column. 

Three towns flipped from Kerry to McCain:
Throop (Cayuga - interesting given how many of its neighboring towns flipped the other way.  Kerry won by 2 votes in 2004, McCain by 23 in 2008)
Brant (Erie - Kerry won by only 13 votes in 2004, McCain by 72 in 2008)
Sangerfield (Oneida - total vote 814 in 2004, 966 in 2008)

Excellent job, Dave! That's great.

Does anybody have the 2004 map for comparison?

Nice work! 

Lot of interesting stuff there, especially along the Hudson...

Unfortunate that the towns in Westchester have to be so small...

What map are you working on next?

Great job ! :D I hope you will continue to improve your fantastic Atlas...

Good work as usual, Dave. If possible, could you post a list or map of townships by county for comparison?

If you're a paying member, this information is already available. ;)

This is really tremendous. So Dave, does this mean you successfully got data from all 62 NY counties? (Well, I guess you get five at a go with the NYC BoE.) That's really impressive - I know from personal experience that it requires a lot of legwork and a decent amount of cash (since quite a few counties charge for their data).

Hi,
Thanks - yes, I built a gigantic spreadsheet incorporating all the precinct data from all 62 counties (including NYC) -> both unfused and fused votes + compiled sheets aggregate the precinct data by city/town, by Assembly District, by Senate District, by Congressional District, and by County.  I've made it available on the store (https://uselectionatlas.org/BOTTOM/store_data.php) page (this particular set of data requires a lot of work - so I ask a bit more than usual for the data).  I still have some minor items to clean up - like qualified write-in vote by precinct in Monroe County, etc, buts its in excellent shape. 

Dave

Hope you have seen the Minnesota (https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/town.php?year=2008&fips=27&f=0&off=0&elect=0&datatype=town) and Wisconsin (https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/town.php?year=2008&fips=55&f=0&off=0&elect=0&datatype=town) maps already completed. I'm working now on Michigan - and being a bit anal - collecting the write-in votes for complete, accurate percentages.

Dave

I'm curious to know how you actually obtained the data file from each county. Did you send letters? Emails? Make phone calls? Some combination of the above? And about how much time did it take? And did most counties charge you, or no?

The reason I ask is because we had to do this for about 120 counties nationwide for the presidential results by CD project, and it was a long, arduous and sometimes expensive project, so I'm wondering how your effort compared. It took myself and a colleague almost two months to collect all of them, and it involved a lot of emails (many unanswered), many phone calls (often more than one to the same BoEs), some formal snail mail FOI requests, and about $300 in out-of-pocket expenses for counties which charged for the data (something which drives me endlessly nuts). And it would have cost even more but for some successful wheedling with a few really outrageous counties.

We had to deal with a number of counties in NY. Most were easy to deal with, and a few charged us. The NYC BoE was pretty helpful but wouldn't release preliminary data to us for parts of Queens in which there was a pending state Senate recount, so we had to cool our heels. The worst was Nassau, which promised me a disk for ages, and then finally sent me a hardcopy canvass book.

Oh, and that's another thing. The quality of the data varied widely. Sometimes we got nice Excel files. Other times we got computer-generated PDFs. Other times we got scanned-in PDFs (ugh). And still others, we had things faxed to us (worst by far). We uploaded everything we got here:

http://www.scribd.com/group/70753-2008-precinct-level-election-results

What about adding the national CDs map ?

My experience is about the same as yours.  Long, arduous, expensive, inconsistent.  Emails, faxes, phone calls - it takes persistence.  Some states have standardized all the counties on the same system (e.g. GA) -> but many, including New York are still county-by-county.  The good news is that most counties now are recording data in some form of electronic file (when I compiled 1992, about half I had to type in by hand - Including Nassau and Westchester!).  Then there are the errors.  Since I am a stickler for proper reconciliation, I investigate differences between the state-wide canvass and the county-canvasses.  It happens more often than one would expect.

I noticed the files you uploaded to scribd - this is a good thing to share.  I have been considering including a feature on the atlas that builds a library of "primary source" documents (i.e. official reports - summary and precinct) linked in to each of the individual counties - could be uploaded by anyone.  Let me know whether you like this idea. (note that some counties actually over-write their data every election and therefore the original information is lost - no history!).  Would be nice to capture and record.

Dave

Since you have the 2004 results could make a swing map or trend map as compared to 2004?

Dave, I can't tell you enough how great an idea this is. Indeed, as you suggest, it's almost vital, given how little care some counties give to storing their data. And I admit, I've often wished I could click on your "Source" descriptions at the bottom of many pages.

I think Scribd works really well for these purposes. It's easy to use, and also seems to be well-indexed by Google. I can understand if you'd want to keep the docs within the Atlas domain, of course - though one thing to consider is that you don't need to worry about bandwidth costs with Scribd. And the infrastructure is all there - folks could start uploading right away. (One nice feature: batch uploading.)

In any case, once again, would love to see you do this.

Sure - attached is the NY Swing Map 2004 - 2008.

Can anyone explain why the Buffalo area didn't swing as much to Obama?

And what's up with the weird swings around Jefferson and Oswego.

I can't say anything too specific, but Buffalo is basically a midwestern/great lakes ex-steel city. The Cleveland area, which is quite similar in many ways, swung a similarly low amount. These areas are sort of in slow, steady decline, unlike the auto areas which had a particular collapse more recently and where Obama did better. The rest of upstate NY is a little (sometimes just a little) more New-Englandish.


Those two adjacent deep blue towns in Lewis county appear to have almost nobody there, and the only noteworthy thing I could find is that the largest wind farm in New York state has recently been constructed there. (google Maple Ridge wind farm). An anti-environmental backlash wouldn't surprise me, if people feel the view's been spoiled.