Miles' Election Map Thread

[JacobNC]

Happy Friday!

Looking at the Triangle trend map.. are we seeing the extremely early beginnings of the realignment of the Republican party? Rich, socially liberal fiscally conservative young college grads moving into the center of cities, gentrifying minority neighborhoods and moving the strongest D precincts further out. Or was Romney just a better fit for these voters? Or both?

That is a very interesting theory.  However, these trends are just comparing Obama '12 to Obama '08, but if you compared Obama '12 to Kerry '04, Gore '00, or Clinton, I think you would still see a strong Democratic trend in white areas of Wake and Mecklenburg County.

Cool.  Interesting to see that the movement towards Romney was not among college students  but the more rural parts of the county.

Actually, one of the precincts that trended Romney contained ASU. That was more of a dead cat bounce than anything though.

Watauga County can be divided into several areas and communties, which explain the voting patterns:

-The Town of Boone, which is dominated by the University and the people associated with. It's dominated by transplants and Northern-Influenced southerners, and It tends to be strongly Democratic.

-The Town of Blowing Rock, which is the second largest town in the County. Blowing Rock is very touristy and is dominated by retirees from Florida. It tends to lean republican, although the Democrats can be competitive.

-The rest of the county tends to be fairly Republican and typically Appalachian, with a good smattering of White liberals and moderates who live in the country due to high housing prices in Boone. There are also some more retirees.

To win in Watauga county, a Democrat needs to either rack up large margins in the Boone Precincts and/or make inroads in the rest of the County.

Good points.  You seem to be someone who is familiar with the area, so do you know why Mitchell & Avery Counties are so heavily Republican?

[Miles]

Cool.  Interesting to see that the movement towards Romney was not among college students  but the more rural parts of the county.

I actually was kinda expecting Johnson to do better around Boone. He only cracked 4% in one precinct.

[JacobNC]

I was surprised by Johnson's lackluster performance nationwide.  I thought with all the cynicism about both Obama and Romney, a third party would do better.  He only got 3% in New Mexico.

[Sol]

.

Cool.  Interesting to see that the movement towards Romney was not among college students  but the more rural parts of the county.

Actually, one of the precincts that trended Romney contained ASU. That was more of a dead cat bounce than anything though.

Watauga County can be divided into several areas and communties, which explain the voting patterns:

-The Town of Boone, which is dominated by the University and the people associated with. It's dominated by transplants and Northern-Influenced southerners, and It tends to be strongly Democratic.

-The Town of Blowing Rock, which is the second largest town in the County. Blowing Rock is very touristy and is dominated by retirees from Florida. It tends to lean republican, although the Democrats can be competitive.

-The rest of the county tends to be fairly Republican and typically Appalachian, with a good smattering of White liberals and moderates who live in the country due to high housing prices in Boone. There are also some more retirees.

To win in Watauga county, a Democrat needs to either rack up large margins in the Boone Precincts and/or make inroads in the rest of the County.

Good points.  You seem to be someone who is familiar with the area, so do you know why Mitchell & Avery Counties are so heavily Republican?
[/quote]
I think you might be asking the wrong question- Watauga is the anomaly. The counties of Northwestern NC are extremely conservative in that traditional Appalachian way- A bit like East Tennessee. Avery was one of Alf Landon's best counties in 1936. Mitchell County is particularly conservative, which seems to be due to the area's isolation and homogeneity.

Oh, & I live around Boone, so yeah.

[old timey villain]

Miles, could you do Chatham County, GA?

[Miles]

Miles, could you do Chatham County, GA?

I'll work on it. Chatham County changed around some precinct names between the elections, but I'll see.

[minionofmidas]

.

Cool.  Interesting to see that the movement towards Romney was not among college students  but the more rural parts of the county.

Actually, one of the precincts that trended Romney contained ASU. That was more of a dead cat bounce than anything though.

Watauga County can be divided into several areas and communties, which explain the voting patterns:

-The Town of Boone, which is dominated by the University and the people associated with. It's dominated by transplants and Northern-Influenced southerners, and It tends to be strongly Democratic.

-The Town of Blowing Rock, which is the second largest town in the County. Blowing Rock is very touristy and is dominated by retirees from Florida. It tends to lean republican, although the Democrats can be competitive.

-The rest of the county tends to be fairly Republican and typically Appalachian, with a good smattering of White liberals and moderates who live in the country due to high housing prices in Boone. There are also some more retirees.

To win in Watauga county, a Democrat needs to either rack up large margins in the Boone Precincts and/or make inroads in the rest of the County.

Good points.  You seem to be someone who is familiar with the area, so do you know why Mitchell & Avery Counties are so heavily Republican?

I think you might be asking the wrong question- Watauga is the anomaly. The counties of Northwestern NC are extremely conservative in that traditional Appalachian way- A bit like East Tennessee. Avery was one of Alf Landon's best counties in 1936. Mitchell County is particularly conservative, which seems to be due to the area's isolation and homogeneity.

Oh, & I live around Boone, so yeah.
[/quote]ASU has the coolest mascot ever.  That's just about all I know about the place.

Avery and Mitchell have been Republican since the Civil War.

[Miles]

Ok, here's the plan for the next few weeks (or months): Hopefully, I'll begin rolling out Pres-by-CD maps of NC within the next day or so. I'll start with CD1 then go numerically until the entire map is done. I'll probably do the same for the Congressional, LG and Gubernatorial races (probably in that order). I'll also probably work in some LA maps along the way!

Also, I was looking back and I need to make a few relatively minor revisions to the Perdue/McCrory state map I posted over the summer.

[homelycooking]

Ok, here's the plan for the next few weeks (or months): Hopefully, I'll begin rolling out Pres-by-CD maps of NC within the next day or so. I'll start with CD1 then go numerically until the entire map is done. I'll probably do the same for the Congressional, LG and Gubernatorial races (probably in that order). I'll also probably work in some LA maps along the way!

Also, I was looking back and I need to make a few relatively minor revisions to the Perdue/McCrory state map I posted over the summer.

Oh it must be so nice to work with official statewide data. I'd really like to make the maps I do without spending months and hundreds of dollars chasing county/municipal officials around for photocopies of their barely legible, hand-written canvass reports.

You're a lucky bastard, Miles.

[Miles]

NC-01 was notable as it was among the fairly few CDs that swung to Obama. This map took me longer than I would liked, mostly because I had to do separate calculations for the (unnecessarily) split precincts in Greenville and Rocky Mount. The other districts should be faster as the precinct-splitting is more or less confined to CDs 1, 3 and 13.



CALCULATIONS.

[Miles]

CALCULATIONS.

[nclib]

Miles, can you finish your Amendment 1 by old CD maps. Also, comparing Obama/Romney to Amendment One may be more telling than Obama/McCain esp. in fast-growing areas.

[Miles]

Ok, I can do the old maps; I have the statewide map for Amendment 1, so I can just carve out the shapes of the old districts and run the county/precinct calculations on them.

I think the Romney/Obama map would be good to have though.

For the larger counties, I can do maps of 2008/2012 trend vs Amendment 1.

[JacobNC]

Wow.  That one little precinct in Bertie County sure does hate Obama.

[Miles]

Amendment 1 under the old CDs:





COUNTY-LEVEL CALCULATIONS BY CD

I'll have the shapefiles up later; the actual calculations were more important, so I did those first.

For comparison, here is the map by the new CDs.

A few points:

- Though I posted otherwise earlier, I actually revisited CD13; the amendment actually failed there by about 2,000 votes.

- This map is more consistent than the new one. For example, every district east of CD12 (excluding 4 and 13) are all the same shade of blue.

- The old 12th would have been narrowly in favor of the amendment while the new one was slightly Against. This was likely a result of the Democratic packing. Kissell's hand into Mecklenburg voted 62/38 Against; when those precincts were transferred from Kissell to Watt, that turned the new 12th into an Against district.

- As I suspected, despite being less Democratic than the new version, the old CD4 was more Against. This is because the old CD4 took in more of the Triangle and did not reach down to heavily Democratic but socially conservative Fayetteville. The removal of of most of Durham also made the 4th less Against, but conversely made the new CD1 less For.

[Miles]

Precinct 42, the striped one south of Winston-Salem, had 0.00% swing.

[Obamanation]

Great maps, Miles! Were you thinking of putting together maps for other Southern states? I would love to see maps of the Appalachian region. Mississippi would also be pretty cool. I would also love to help out in any way I can.

[Miles]

Great maps, Miles! Were you thinking of putting together maps for other Southern states? I would love to see maps of the Appalachian region. Mississippi would also be pretty cool. I would also love to help out in any way I can.

I'm doing a few with LA as well. I'll probably be doing more southern maps, but not for the swing/trend.

NC is convenient in that the precinct labels and shapes from 2008 are the same as they the ones from 2012. This makes calculating the swing/trend very simple; its a nice apples-to-apples comparison.

[Miles]

The Jacksonville/New Bern area. These 5 counties also happen to make up State Senate districts 2 (Carteret, Craven, Pamlico) and 6 (Onslow, Jones).

[Miles]

For these swing/trend maps, I'll be doing two more; I'll have a swath of counties in southeatsern NC stretching from Columbus to Pender, plus I'll do Buncombe as well.

'Any more swing/trend trend requests for NC?

[Miles]

Damn; I forgot to save the swing map for Southeastern NC. That will be be next; here's the trend:

[Miles]

Whoah, this looks really neat:

[Torie]

Why did those inner city precincts in Winston-Salem and Greensboro trend so strongly Dem? Are they getting more black?

[JacobNC]

^^More minority voters were registered to his election and that helped to bump Obama's numbers in some precincts.  Dems in NC really did a good job at getting out the vote, as it was one of few states where Obama got more votes in 2012 than 2008; Republicans just did better, though.

Miles:  Thanks for the Southeast NC maps.  It looks like parts of Wilmington had the same swings as Charlotte and Raleigh, with the $$$ money areas around Wrightsville Beach going strong for Romney.  Those areas were also against Amendment One.

An interesting map to add to your list would be an Obama/Dalton comparison map.  Believe it or not there were a few counties in the East and the West where Obama did worse than poor ol' Walter Dalton.  Dalton didn't do well enough to win any Romney counties, although he nearly won Columbus and Chowan.

[Miles]

^^More minority voters were registered to his election and that helped to bump Obama's numbers in some precincts.  Dems in NC really did a good job at getting out the vote, as it was one of few states where Obama got more votes in 2012 than 2008; Republicans just did better, though.

This is what I was going to, Torie. I think the swing to Obama in black precincts was a function of the better OFA turnout operation.

The swing in the Triad lines up nicely with the racial map:



The heavily black precincts make a crescent shape in Greensboro and a backslash in W-S. Less than a handful of these precincts trended R.

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I think I'll add Sampson, Duplin, Scotland and Hoke counties to that big map; I think that would make it look more complete

Dalton even lost Columbus County; its voted for McCain and Romney, but no local Democrat should lose there. I think what was also embarrassing was the he lost his home county, Rutherford. I know that its though sledding for any Democrat, but he emphasized being from a "small town" in his ads and he won it by 20 points in hos 2008 LG race.

I can do an Obama vs. Dalton county map.