2000-2012 National County Swing Map

[minionofmidas]

Hours and hours of innocent fun!

[minionofmidas]

Mississippi is strange on that map.

Most people don't know that, but Mississippi has supermajority white parts and these parts had a considerable, if minority, Democratic vote up until 2004. Those are hard swings in the corners.
Oh, and Black turnout was lower than White for a very long time - contrast Louisiana where that wasn't the case.
If Dems had somehow managed to get the Black turnout up without alienating their hillbilly voters (both in the quasi-Appalachian Northeast corner and in the Piney Belt - an area just north of the coastal counties (continuing into Alabama) that was largely uninhabited between Indian Removal and the latter 19th century, btw - you'd be looking at a genuine swing state now.

P.S: Any prospect of a 1988-2012 swing map?

That would definitely take a new color scheme. Given how hard some of those dark shades in the Atlas Standard Key are to differentiate anyways, I didn't go past +30 (American terminology, so really +15)... but some of those Appalachian swings are much higher, a few over twice that. There's counties that Gore and Romney both got about 2/3 of the vote in. With 1988 to 2012, even more of the map'd be a sea of dark colors without a new color scheme.

[minionofmidas]

Ah, fascinating, if basically pretty depressing.

Some details are perfectly strange. I mean, Kennebec as the only county in Maine where Romney did better than Bush'04?

And some are just hilarious, like all those pink or light blue islands in seas of dark blue that happen to be the population centres.

[minionofmidas]

AZ is the big surprise here to me. So much for this being a 'swing state' in the immediate future.

Remember this, though

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=164507.msg3529902#new

I'll update this map once we have actual final results from absolutely everywhere.

[minionofmidas]

Updated map.



This is definitely not yet the final data on Massachusetts, and possibly elsewhere, but I didn't want to wait any longer.

While I was at it I caught an error in the Atlas, too (Waupaca Co, WI. It's corrected here and I've pm'ed Dave! )
Oh, and I caught two earlier errors of mine and I don't even want to know how many are left - it's not as if I doublechecked the many areas where nothing changed.

[minionofmidas]

I wonder what a map of the two party vote would look like. Obama's performance in the west is a bit overstated I think.

Not that badly.

Nader in western (incl. plains) states mapped
5   Montana     5.95%
6   Hawaii     5.88%
8   Colorado         5.25%
11   Oregon    5.04%
12   Utah    4.65%
14   Washington     4.14%
16   California     3.82%
19   New Mexico     3.55%
20   Nebraska     3.52%
21   Kansas     3.37%
22   North Dakota        3.29%
23   Arizona         2.98%
28   Nevada        2.46%
29   Idaho         2.45%
34   Wyoming     2.12%
and no ballot access in South Dakota.

Central Kentucky does not sit atop of coal like both the east and the west do, you see. Also, the southern part of it is so heavily ancestrally Republican that Democrats could hardly have fallen any further, and north of that you get the most urban areas of the state, Louisville, Lexington, the cincy suburbs, even Frankfort.

[minionofmidas]

Of course: https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/IMAGES/key.gif.

W00t! I've been published in The New Republic!

And they just hotlink images instead of stating where they found them? That's cheap. If better than screenshooting them without giving a source.

[minionofmidas]