From D.C. to Utah - partisan statistics on a state level from 1964 to 2012

[pbrower2a]

Good work here. At first sight I would have questioned whether the appropriate contrast was between a blowout (1964) and the one election that most fits the mean in electoral votes (2012)... and at that, 2012 is the freak election because there is no other election since 1900 in which the winner got between 57.1% and 66.5% of the electoral vote.

(I confess to one of the worst predictions of the 2012 election -- all year I was forecasting that Barack Obama would get either fewer than 308 or more than 358 electoral votes because Romney was going to use a strategy to give himself more of a chance to win but a chance to lose big. He lost one state [Florida] late  with a campaign pitch that tried to connect President Obama with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez).   2012 was the election with the results closest to the mean in electoral votes... by far.

As is my tendency I will be creating a map in an effort to show any regional and strong state tendencies.

[pbrower2a]

THE DRIFT

Blue toward Republicans, red toward Democrats. Individual districts of Nebraska not shown.

Yellow -- no drift (applies only to DC)

20% -- less than 1.5 either way

30%  --  1.9 to 3.1

40%  --  3.5 to 5.1

50%  --  5.8 to 7.1

70%  --  7.8 to 11.4

80%  -- 12 to 18.8

90%  --  28.8 (West Virginia)

[pbrower2a]

A few musings on the drift:

1. Very small drifts (3 or fewer) may be relative positioning of similar states. So Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming change places. It's statistical noise. 

Of course it is a big deal if the state is toward the median and mean in partisanship and has 18 electoral votes (Ohio) and can decide the Presidential election as a large swing state.

2. Some of it looks like reversion to the mean. Indiana and Minnesota are prime examples. States get neglected because they are understood to be 'solid' and 'immovable'... and all of a sudden Barack Obama wins Indiana in 2008.

3. Favorite Son effects should not be discounted. Figure that Barry Goldwater barely won Arizona yet lost Colorado and Nevada, both of which were then similarly conservative. Figure also that LBJ won Texas by a comparatively small margin in a blowout election in his own state. Put Goldwater in Texas and LBJ in Arizona, and the states switch.  Those are two of the more likely distortions in 1964. It is hard to figure which state has Romney as a Favorite Son so I will say nothing of him, but take away Barack Obama from Illinois and Illinois would probably be much closer than it was in 2012. VP nominees don't matter that much.

4. LBJ was a loud proponent of desegregation and voting rights for blacks; Goldwater was comparatively silent. Much of the vote for Goldwater was a protest vote against LBJ on race.  In 1964 the Republican nominee got pulled into the racial divide that re-emerged in 2008 and 2012 because one of the nominees was someone with much more melanin than the usual American candidate for President.   

eric82oslo, you made a very good call. 

5. I would have probably avoided 1968 because of George Wallace.

Now for the big changes:

6. For those going decidedly D we have several categories. First, states that once had strong 'liberal Republican' politicians like Oregon and Vermont, the disappearance of those politicians marks the decisive drift of the states from strongly R to decidedly D. Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, and New York are likely in that category.  Another is those with huge migrations of likely-D voters. For California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and California such is largely the Hispanic (in those cases, Mexican-American) voters that the Republican Party has offended with xenophobic appeals as red meat to bigots that they think necessary for winning the current election. But with a popular shift, those bigots can no longer make enough of a difference.

In Virginia it is an inflow of liberal-leaning government employees to the suburbs of Washington DC. PPP had a study of baseball loyalties as a measure of where people were really from -- and baseball loyalties don't change easily. That many voters in Virginia identified themselves as fans of the "Red Sox", "Yankees", "Phillies", and "Cubs" -- maybe "Tigers", "Pirates", and "Indians" if such choices were available if the question were asked -- indicated that many Virginia voters were connected to the Northeast and Midwest, and likely to the Democratic Party.    "Orioles" are or were local favorites before the Nationals came in and started winning, and "Braves" and "Reds" have a following on southern and western Virginia.  Florida and North Carolina are almost the same. 

New Hampshire used to be an anomalously right-wing state for the area. It had crusty right-winters like Gordon Humphrey and Meldrim Humphrey as high-profile figures. They typically used "Taxachusetts" as a bogey... but the state eventually became politically more like Massachusetts. It remains the least D-leaning state northeast of the Potomac, but it isn't going to vote for an R nominee for President unless "D" stands for disaster.

As late as 1964, fellows in ghostly attire helped ensure that blacks did not vote in some states.  Such is no longer true in Georgia and Mississippi.



On the other side...

7. The Appalachians and Ozarks used to be more D-leaning than they are now... much more! States that have significant  territory in the Appalachians have seen these areas go decidedly R. This reflects the weakening of the influence of the United Mine Workers' Union as coal seams are exhausted. Coal barons have largely broken the union, once a powerful force for economic and political liberalism. I have heard visitors to Appalachia show shock at the extent of gutter racism in the area to the extent that it is now much worse than in the Deep South. (In the Deep South there are at least power-sharing arrangements and people learn at the least to modulate their language).

Unions are strong supporters of racial equality, union officials typically going on marches with Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s. Union officials considered racism a threat to unity within unions and supported legislation that specifically prohibited unions from signing agreements that allowed unequal pay based on race and against discrimination against people on the basis of race.  But when unions are broken, the conduit for liberal ideas through the union paper disappears. FoX Propaganda Channel fills the ideological vacuum.

West Virginia  is the extreme. It used to be much more liberal-leaning than the rest of America; in 1980 it gave Jimmy Carter six of his paltry 49 electoral votes, and in 1988 it stood out as the one state to vote for Dukakis despite its neighbors all voting for the elder Bush. That is over.

One commentator noted in 2008 that in proportion to use of the internet, West Virginians were most likely to search for a word often used as a smear for black people. How far can a state fall?

.............

Of course some things will be different in 2016. The Democratic nominee for President will be white -- if that makes a difference. Barack Obama may have been an inordinately good match for the political values of some states and a horrible one for some others.