Ohio Demographic Maps

[jimrtex]

Here’s the one I’ve already shown (and the only one with names on the counties): Percentage Catholic by county

Noticeable things:
Ohio’s Catholics are concentrated along the lake, in the upper Miami valley, and near Cincinnati and Youngstown. The Miami Valley has two counties (Mercer and Putnam) that are more than 50%. My home county of Erie has more than average. The southeastern and rural central parts of the state have virtually no Catholics and few live in Columbus.

Are the rural areas in the NW German?   Is the variation due to colonization efforts and where the colonists came from.  That is the pattern in the Texas Hill Country and also between Houston and San Antonio, where you will have some very Catholic towns and some very Lutheran ones. 

In Cleveland, Croat and Irish?  The southeast would be Scots-Irish with Columbus being an overlay of that, and you had a bit of industrialization in Steubenville and other areas just downstream from Pittsburgh.  Otherwise you could go Adams-Hardin-Carroll and everything southeast as the low percentage.

When I was drawing districts in Columbus, I was surprised at how many of the roads had German names.  It made it seem like Houston.

[jimrtex]

Here’s a more complicated Ohio religion demographics map. I broke it into four groups: Catholic (green), Mainline Protestant (blue), Evangelical Protestant (red), and other (black). The data is from the ARDA Database and uses the ARDA’s designations for what falls under each group. The coloring is done so that the brighter each color is the more of that group is present.

Are Pickaway and Champaign and Ashland distinct, or is it simply a case of relatively few Catholics, and balance between evangelical and mainline Protestants?

Why is Delaware so Catholic?  Would it have been so say 30 years ago when there would have been less suburban growth?  (eg is it like Putnam and Mercer with an addition of suburbanites, or is it like Franklin with fewer Blacks, who tend to be Protestant.

Totally unrelated: why are street blocks in Cleveland so long?

[jimrtex]

Would it be possible to do a map on the differential between the SOS race (Husted) and the gubernatorial race (Kasich)?  I am curious why Husted did so much better than the other Republicans in 2010.

[jimrtex]

Would it be possible to do a map on the differential between the SOS race (Husted) and the gubernatorial race (Kasich)?  I am curious why Husted did so much better than the other Republicans in 2010.

I can make a map, but Husted wasn't even the Republican who won by the largest statewide margin, State Treasurer Josh Mandel was. My guess as to why Attorney General and Governor were closer than the other two races is that they included higher profile and more controversial candidates. Strickland was a so-so governor and Kasich wasn't terribly popular even at the time of the election. DeWine was a former US Senator who made a few enemies, or at least more than Mandel or Husted, who both won comfortably as "Generic Republican" in a wave year.

The reason I ask, is that the redistricting contest used the Governor, Secretary of State, and Auditor race from the 2010 election and the 2008 presidential race as their measure of partisanship.  Because 3 races were included were from 2010, about 2/3 of the vote was from 2010 (turnout in 2010 was about 2/3 of 2008).  This in itself introduces a bias.

Since the purpose was to produce "competitive" congressional races, the underlying model (at least in part) was assuming voters in a congressional district would be as likely to vote for generic Republican as they did Husted.   The only thing that I found was that Husted's opponent had been portrayed as a gun grabber because when she was a member of the Columbus city council she had favored letting Columbus have its own regulations on carrying guns, such that someone who was legal in their part of the state would commit a felony by driving into Columbus.

So I was wondering if there was some sort of rural bias towards Husted, particularly in the fairly balanced areas in SE Ohio.

[jimrtex]

Husted in is teal in both maps.

Here'’s Husted-Kasich. Husted did better in every single county. The county where Kasich was the closest to Husted was Cuyahoga. You can see the margins are especially large in the northwest and in Strickland’s old district, in particular the parts he represented before the 2001 redistricting. Kasich holds up much better in urban areas than rural ones.

I suppose there is a possibility of RTKABA vote giving Husted a few extra percentage.  Or it is possible that voters in rural areas are more discerning of individual candidates since they don't have to sort through dozens of congressional and legislative and local races.  If you don't have the money to spend on TV advertising like gubernatorial candidates, you may be willing to make yourself available to every newspaper and radio station in the state.

And even the urban areas are problematic for the contest rules.  If you use the SOS race rather than the AG race, you've added in a percentage or two boost to the 3-race average for 2010 even in the urban areas, which are particularly the areas that you don't want to overestimate the support of "generic Republican" when the contest rules are trying to make the race competitive.

[jimrtex]

One other note: I only considered the two-party vote when I calculated the margins.

That matches the contest's methodology.   They went even further and simply totaled up votes.  If there was a significant 3rd party or independent vote in a particular race, it would at minimum reduce the weight of that race - but worse would likely skew the results of a race, since the other candidate would likely take more votes from one candidate than the other.