Gore - H.R. Clinton comparison county map

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Errors are possible, minor inconsistencies in rounding pretty much a cert. But enjoy.

[Vosem]

I continue to be amazed by the presence of Appalachian counties where Gore won outright, Kerry lost by single-digits, and Trump broke 80%.

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

Can someone make a map of the counties in which HRC got more votes in 2008 than in the 2016 general election?

[Adam Griffin]

Can someone make a map of the counties in which HRC got more votes in 2008 than in the 2016 general election?

Made this awhile ago, apparently never posted it anywhere but on Twitter. Computer got wiped, hence the low quality of the image, but:

https://snag.gy/xGBEkU.jpg

[Adam Griffin]

Also, is this map based on each candidate's percentage of the vote, or difference in margin? I'm guessing the former based on the map description, but just wanted to be sure.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Also, is this map based on each candidate's percentage of the vote, or difference in margin? I'm guessing the former based on the map description, but just wanted to be sure.

The former, yes.

[Intell]

Great Map, also very sad.

[Chinggis]

Some thoughts...

The Democratic collapse is centered in the Appalachian coalfield (of course), along with rural middle Tennessee (Al Gore's stomping grounds and a region where many white country people, you would probably call them rednecks, quietly kept voting for Democrats every two or four years until very recently), and other centers of the Scots-Irish diaspora like northwest Arkansas (a collective middle finger to the Clintons, or specifically Hillary?) and Little Dixie in eastern Oklahoma. Not many surprises there.

I continue to be amazed by the presence of Appalachian counties where Gore won outright, Kerry lost by single-digits, and Trump broke 80%.

Harlan County, Kentucky (Democratic Presidential %)

1996: 58%
2000: 51%
2004: 39%
2008: 26%
2012: 17%
2016: 13%


Or look at Elliott County (not really coal country but definitely in the same cultural orbit).

1996: Clinton 64%
2016: Clinton 26%

An awful lot of people in that corner of the world changed their minds about the Clintons and the Democratic Party in the last 20 years. Is it NAFTA blowback? The spread of cable and Internet access (and with it, Fox News and fake news)? Revulsion at Hillary's promise to "put a lot of coal miners out of work," or her dreams of "open trade and open borders"? All of the above and more, I'm sure.

Iused to think there was actually a Democratic basement in Appalachia, but I'm not so certain anymore. How much worse can the Democrats do in a place like Bloody Harlan? Single digits in 2020? Who knows!

[Antonio the Sixth]

This is horrifying.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

This is horrifying.

How so? It just shows that the dumbs live where we expected them to.

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

This is horrifying.

Of course it is. And yet, the majority of the Democratic Party would like to double down on this. For a party that basically won the last election, the future is hopeless because the party is broken. Even if we win, what realistic progress will be made? The pressure will be on to completely ignore and punish these people.

[Intell]

This is horrifying.

How so? It just shows that the dumbs live where we expected them to.

f*k off, you awful trash human being.

[Antonio the Sixth]

This is horrifying.

How so? It just shows that the dumbs live where we expected them to.

...

You and your ilk will never learn, will you? Your or actually, our little happy clique of enlightened urban liberal "smarts" will continue to celebrate its own moral and intellectual superiority while the world around it burns and pretending that it's "their" fault and not ours.

[TDAS04]

The Colorado Rockies certainly stick out, probably for the same reasons as Teton County, Wyoming and the skiing areas of Montana.

[Mr. Morden]

This is horrifying.

How so? It just shows that the dumbs live where we expected them to.

...

You and your ilk will never learn, will you? Your or actually, our little happy clique of enlightened urban liberal "smarts" will continue to celebrate its own moral and intellectual superiority while the world around it burns and pretending that it's "their" fault and not ours.

I agree that Hagrid's response was dumb, but I'm legit uncertain about your reasoning in your "This is horrifying" post.  What aspect of it is horrifying?  The national %age of the vote won by Gore in 2000 is about the same as that of Clinton 2016.  So what's horrifying?  The fact that Clinton's support is more concentrated in cities, or what?

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

This is horrifying.

How so? It just shows that the dumbs live where we expected them to.

...

You and your ilk will never learn, will you? Your or actually, our little happy clique of enlightened urban liberal "smarts" will continue to celebrate its own moral and intellectual superiority while the world around it burns and pretending that it's "their" fault and not ours.

I agree that Hagrid's response was dumb, but I'm legit uncertain about your reasoning in your "This is horrifying" post.  What aspect of it is horrifying?  The national %age of the vote won by Gore in 2000 is about the same as that of Clinton 2016.  So what's horrifying?  The fact that Clinton's support is more concentrated in cities, or what?

Clearly the fact that the working class is fleeing the Democratic Party - the ones who are supposed to be the caretaker of those forgotten and oppressed. The composition of the party is becoming something ugly. It's great when other people want to vote for you, but not when they invade and change the meaning of what that vote is for and the constituencies that benefit.

What difference does it make how you perform in an election if nothing good is to come of it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The first horrifying thing is what Smilo said. The party associated with "the left" ought to also be the party of the working class (of all the working class, regardless of skin color or gender). If that isn't the case, something is deeply wrong in the universe.

The second is that what this map suggests is that most of the areas that were already titanium-red and titanium-blue in 2000 have polarized even more, and that's also extremely unhealthy to our democracy. People these days only interact with like-minded people, and never get exposed to alternative viewpoints. As a result, the two "sides" start hating each other. I'm sick and tired of the vitriol I seen against T***p supporters on my FB feed.

[DC Al Fine]

The first horrifying thing is what Smilo said. The party associated with "the left" ought to also be the party of the working class (of all the working class, regardless of skin color or gender). If that isn't the case, something is deeply wrong in the universe.

That's the problem, many of the West's centre-left parties aren't really 'left' anymore, especially the Democrats. They aren't working class parties, rather they represent a set of constituencies that happen to have a working class component. The question is, is this due to the parties 'losing their way' or are we transitioning to a new paradigm with the old model left outdated?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is horrifying.

How so? It just shows that the dumbs live where we expected them to.

How is voting for George W. Bush less 'dumb' than voting for Donald Trump?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They aren't working class parties, rather they represent a set of constituencies that happen to have a working class component.

That was always the case (although I would phrase it slightly differently) actually. But increasingly the Democratic Party and its problems are quite different to those parties and theirs at a psephological level...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Clearly the fact that the working class is fleeing the Democratic Party - the ones who are supposed to be the caretaker of those forgotten and oppressed. The composition of the party is becoming something ugly. It's great when other people want to vote for you, but not when they invade and change the meaning of what that vote is for and the constituencies that benefit.

To take this further: because politics is a practical trade electoral coalitions dictate policy to a greater extent than is fashionable to admit (which is also why perceived betrayals by politicians are so toxic). Essentially if you wish to see social policies that benefit the whole of society rather than just the top whatever percent in terms of income, then recent trends in American elections are bad because they represent the dilution of class politics and the marginalisation of the American egalitarian (i.e. that which was once described as 'populist' until the word took on other connotations) tradition.

[DC Al Fine]

They aren't working class parties, rather they represent a set of constituencies that happen to have a working class component.

That was always the case (although I would phrase it slightly differently) actually. But increasingly the Democratic Party and its problems are quite different to those parties and theirs at a psephological level...

Could you elaborate?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They aren't working class parties, rather they represent a set of constituencies that happen to have a working class component.

That was always the case (although I would phrase it slightly differently) actually. But increasingly the Democratic Party and its problems are quite different to those parties and theirs at a psephological level...

Could you elaborate?

On which issue?

[DC Al Fine]

They aren't working class parties, rather they represent a set of constituencies that happen to have a working class component.

That was always the case (although I would phrase it slightly differently) actually. But increasingly the Democratic Party and its problems are quite different to those parties and theirs at a psephological level...

Could you elaborate?

On which issue?

On how the Democratic Party's psephological problems are increasingly different from other major Western centre left parties.

[muon2]

The first horrifying thing is what Smilo said. The party associated with "the left" ought to also be the party of the working class (of all the working class, regardless of skin color or gender). If that isn't the case, something is deeply wrong in the universe.

That's the problem, many of the West's centre-left parties aren't really 'left' anymore, especially the Democrats. They aren't working class parties, rather they represent a set of constituencies that happen to have a working class component. The question is, is this due to the parties 'losing their way' or are we transitioning to a new paradigm with the old model left outdated?

I think the paradigm of the US parties splitting along a labor/management divide has been changing for a long time. Here was one of my observations immediately after the election.

What has happened over the last 20 years is an unprecedented separation of the parties along urban and rural lines. Look at this map from the Chicago Tribune of the last 6 presidential elections in IL.



The drain of Dems from the rural counties into the Chicago metro area and vice verse for the Pubs is obvious. When Dems were spread throughout the rural US a swing in popular vote would swing enough EVs so that the PV and EV tracked each other for over 100 years until 2000. Now that the Dems are so highly concentrated it's much easier to swing a bunch of EVs without swinging the PV as much. That's what happened this year - large concentrations of Dems in CA and NY weren't matched by large numbers of Pubs in TX so those Dem concentrations didn't convert into EVs.

So the paradigm shift was from a labor/management divide to a urban/rural divide. A second factor is the shift to a professional/nonprofessional divide among white voters that is showing up in areas like the Chicago suburbs especially in this last election.