Mapping Presidential Turnout Changes vs Trends by County
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  Presidential Elections - Analysis and Discussion
  U.S. Presidential Election Results (Moderator: Dereich)
  Mapping Presidential Turnout Changes vs Trends by County
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Author Topic: Mapping Presidential Turnout Changes vs Trends by County  (Read 2167 times)
Miles
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« on: December 05, 2014, 01:00:10 AM »
« edited: December 05, 2014, 01:03:21 AM by Miles »

I'll start with 2008-2012 Cheesy



Scale:



I was experimenting with the partisan trends and turnout differences; I've made national maps for both in the past, but wanted some way to combine them. Homely's race/party maps provided a good starting point for working out my color scheme Smiley

Basically, the darker counties on this map cast more votes in 2012 than they did in 2008. As turnout was lower nationwide, the majority of counties are lighter, meaning fewer votes cast. Likewise, counties that trended Democratic are a pinker shade of purple while Republican-trending counties are bluer/violet.

An ideal situation for Democrats would thus be something like Maryland or southern TX: darker shades  of pink = higher turnout + favorable trend. Utah and western ND would be some of the best results for the GOP here.

Hopefully, I'll be making this into somewhat of a series with more maps Grin
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shua
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« Reply #1 on: December 05, 2014, 05:53:20 PM »

interesting. nice work.  lots of crazy stuff in that map going on out West. 
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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #2 on: December 05, 2014, 07:16:22 PM »

Great job!  You can pretty clearly see the impact of the Obama campaign ignoring the lean D and lean R states to focus on OH/CO/VA/WI/NH.
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Miles
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« Reply #3 on: December 05, 2014, 09:22:00 PM »

^ Thanks!

Also, for reference, here's what the state shades would be:



UT and WV were where Romney got his best trends, but you can see how UT cast more votes while WV had less.
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Miles
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« Reply #4 on: December 19, 2014, 08:15:45 PM »

Here's 2004-2012. My method for this version was slightly different. First I compared the partisan trend to what I'm calling the "turnout trend," mostly for lack of a better phrase. Essentially, national turnout was up 5.67% between 2004 and 2012. The counties that cast more votes but were under a 5.67% increase, were considered to have cast less votes.



My scale was also tweaked slightly:



Again, the vertical axis is turnout (darker = more votes, lighter= less votes) while the horizontal axis corresponds to the party trend (red= D, blue = R).

Finally, this would be the breakdown by state:



If anyone has data for AK, I'd appreciate it if you'd reach out to me. I'd love to do the results by borough on the county map, but can only find data for its electoral districts (which were redrawn between going into 2012).
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Antonio the Sixth
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« Reply #5 on: December 20, 2014, 09:33:00 AM »

This is very interesting, but I think there's a flaw in your measurement of turnout. If it's based on comparing the number of raw votes from one election to the other, then there's a bias in favor of States with high population growth, where one should expect an increase in raw votes even if turnout is stagnant.
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Miles
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« Reply #6 on: December 20, 2014, 02:11:01 PM »

^ I just wanted to see how that method would turn out, more than anything else. Yes, you'd expect states that grew faster to have more turnout and vice versa, but they're not always correlated. Many counties in Appalachia cast more votes than the national increase, despite losing population.  
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