2012 White Obama Lovers Map by County Project: COMPLETE!

[Torie]

Are Obama's "white lovers" male or female? Inquiring minds want to know.

[Torie]

Are Obama's "white lovers" male or female? Inquiring minds want to know.

Gays and females.

Adam, nice job on Tennessee, considering the constraints you mentioned. I have calculated the white vote % for Davidson County before and I got the same number as you. Based on my interactions with people it would seem like a decent majority of whites are voting Democrat here but I usually hang around places like Downtown, East Nashville, Germantown and the West End area where whites are voting for the Democrats. That drops precipitously once you get outside the 440/Briley Parkway loop.

Playing around with Davidson County, and slicing it up into four zones, one where McCain clearly carried the white vote (orange), a second where Obama clearly did (Cyan), a third zone where I was not sure (yellow), and a fourth zone (blue) that is majority BVAP (where Obama again carried the white vote, and overwhelmingly), and then playing around with turnout percentages to make the numbers work for each zone, Obama got about 42.5% of the white vote, plus or minus a couple of percent, but no more of an error than that. Black turnout was probably higher in Davidson County than white turnout. The key constant to make it all work, was the assumption, which is reasonable, that Obama got 95% of the black vote across the board. With that assumption as a constant, the rest of the numbers can be massaged to get an idea of who did what to whom.  There also are clearly differentials in turnout percentages between the four zones.

[Torie]

Whats the story with south-central kentucky? Its been almost near reliably republican since forever.

It was pro Union, and thus pro Pub after the Civil War (no slaves in this mountainous, subsistence agricultural backwater), given that it was subsistence agriculture, and had no coal,  its economy was not much affected by the Great Depression, or its politics by the miners' union, it's all white and has almost no Catholics (and has had almost no immigration in since rocks cooled; it's almost all pre 19th century English stock), so the Civil Right movement had no impact, and the Catholic JFK really, really bombed there (one of the counties, Jackson, was at once the most pro Nixon and poorest county in the nation in 1960), and disliked the government coming in and bothering the moonshiners, and now has some tourist activity, and uber conservative retirees, who like an affordable, and culturally and ethnically homogeneous environment, in which to live. It's also quite pro military (Kentucky has a very high rate of military service). And now the Dems are waging a war on coal against its neighbors just to the east.

It is an incredibly beautiful place actually. I love it.

[Torie]

Incredible work. Thank you.

[Torie]

What seems plausible to me is that Hispanics in more white areas, particularly more middle class conservative ones, or conservative rural areas in some instances, might be considerably more Republican than the norm for Hispanics, and if one is not careful, that might tend to overestimate the white vote percentages for the Pubs, assuming it must be high to get to the final result, when it really is about, at least in part, more Pub friendly Hispanics. Hispanics are a lot trickier to gage than blacks, when it comes to regional variations.