Somerset County, ME 2012 Presidential Election Results
Hidden in the 2012 Presidential Election data is a small unincorporated township in Maine that was won by Ron Paul. There were a total of three votes cast – all three were write-in votes for Ron Paul – both Obama and Romney came up empty. The 2012 general election is the first time that the Maine Secretary of State Bureau of Corporations, Elections & Commissions has published presidential election results for Concord Twp. Although not actively running for President in the 2012 General Election, Ron Paul was certified as a declared write-in candidate for President in Maine, allowing his write-in votes to be counted (see 2012 Maine Declared Write-in Candidates).
The image to the right shows the full results by township for Somerset County, ME in the 2012 General Election for President. Concord Twp is located in Somerset County on the west side of the Kennebec River to the north of Embden Town (colored in dark yellow on the map). Concord Twp is included with Lexington Twp to form the census “Central Somerset UT”.
In spite of the plethora of low population towns in New England, wins by “third party” candidates are quite rare. Not since Ross Perot in 1996, has a third party won in any New England town (Perot won three and tied in a fourth in 1996. Perot won a substantial number of towns in 1992). Nader tied Al Gore in 2000 in Pinkham’s Grant, NH 3-3.
The 2013 Special United States Senate Election in Massachusetts preliminary results have been posted. The contest between Democratic Congressman Ed Markey, representing the Massachusetts 5th district and Republican Gabriel Gomez has ended with a 54.8% to 44.8% victory for Markey. This is a Democratic hold of the seat vacated by now Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Atlas results database has been upgraded to support the event in which two U.S. Senate races occur in the same year from the same state. The term “class” has been added to distinguish between the elections. There are three U.S. Senate classes that alternate every two years – repeating every six. 2010 is a class 3 election. There also happen to be three Special Elections that are also taking place on November 2, 2010 – Delaware (Class 2), West Virginia (Class 1), and New York (Class 1). Delaware and West Virginia do not have a Class 3 Senate seat, and therefore have only one contest on November 2. New York, however, does have a Class 3 Senate seat and has two Senate contests on Nov 2. To support this, I’ve upgraded all general election contests from 1990 through 2010 – and all the past special two-senate-from-one-state contests not previously included in the results menus are now available. These include 1992 CA & ND, 1994 TN, 1996 KS, 2008 MS & WY and 2010 NY.
The map at the right shows a small version of the statewide results in Washington of the 2008 General Election for President by precinct (Obama in Red, McCain in Blue). This was made possible because the Washington Secretary of State has posted all the precinct-level GIS shape files. Most of the shape files line up with the county precinct data (although there are a number of discrepancies). The map link to the right brings you to the forum topic discussion on the 2008 Presidential Results by Precinct in Washington. The maps provide a very detailed geographic breakdown of the results, clearly showing the urban-rural split that has developed between the Republican and Democratic regions of support. Additional tweaking of the map is planned to incorporate the closest match to precinct boundaries used in the 2008 General Election for several counties.
The preliminary (unofficial) results of the 2010 Massachusetts Special Senate Election are available. In a surprise, Republican candidate Scott Brown defeated Democratic candidate Martha Coakley 52% to 47%. This result is actually very similar to the 2002 Gubernatorial Election Result where Mitt Romney defeated Shannon O’Brien by 5 percentage points (50% – 45%). Also, interestingly, the voter turnout for the snowy January 19 Special Election actually exceeded the turnout in both the 2002 and 2006 General Elections (preliminary figures show 2,249,026 votes in the special election vs. 2,194,179 votes in the 2002 General Election and 2,219,779 votes in the 2006 General Election).
Obama was victorious in 372 cities and towns to McCain’s 623 (there were two ties). However, Obama’s 372 victories were in places of considerably higher population – those 372 cities and towns cast 5,961,925 votes for Presidential Candidates, whereas in McCain’s 623 cities, and towns, a far less 1,679,564 votes were cast.
Relative to 2004, Obama increased Democratic victories by 154 (a 70% increase), many of the Republican-to-Democratic flips were in Upstate suburbs, the North Country (Northern Adirondacks and Quebec border), and in the Catskill region. Three towns flipped from Kerry to McCain (Throop (Cayuga), Brant (Erie), and Sangerfield (Oneida)).
The site has a new feature – timelines for the 2008 Republican and Democratic Primaries. These pages show a summary of all the contests in chronological order, including vote percentages, estimated delegates, winning candidates, summary national map, pie charts, and county-map icons. Links are provided for each state summary results page. The timelines will automatically update following each event.
I have created a new method for posting election results in Blogs – an interactive election map “widget” – a small snipet that can be placed in the code section of a blog post. The map has mouse-over interactivity, including a county-level imagemap with the floating text box of results plus links to more detailed returns. Below is an example comparing the 2004 General Election Result in South Carolina to the 2008 Republican Primary in South Carolina.
The link for this code may be seen by clicking on the link titled “Blog Interactive Map Widget Code for this Contest” in the “Election Tools” section of any state (or national) summary page. The code can then be placed in an uselectionatlas.org weblog post (note in order to use this widget, you need to enable the pageview plugin on the “Plugins” tab in the admin section of you weblog. At this time, this widget can’t be used on other weblogs since iframes are generally not permitted using most blogging software.
The unofficial results are in from the competitive 2006 Republican Primary for Seante in Rhode Island. In this race, incumbent Senator Lincoln Chafee was challenged by Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey. The unofficial result published by the Rhode Island Board of Elections is: Chafee (i) 34,407 (54.22%); Laffey 29,052 (45.78%), a margin of about 8 percentage points.The township map reveals the strength of each candidate. Laffey performed best in the North (Providence County) outside the city. His best municipality is the town of Johnston where he won 62.8% of the vote. In his home-town city of Cranston, he received his largest vote margin of 447 votes, capturing 52.5% of the vote. Chafee had his strength in the city of Providence and the south of the state (Bristol, Newport and Washington Counties). His best municipaility is the town of New Shoreham (Block Island) where he received 78.3% of the vote. Chafee received his largest vote margin in the City of Warwick – 2,134 votes where he won 62.3% to 37.6%.An interesting statistic with regard to the lack of Republican Strength in Rhode Island – in the City of Providence (2000 Voting-Age Population of 128,341 – almost twice as many people as in Warwick, the second largest city): the total number of votes cast in the Republican primary was 2,941 votes, 1/5th the 14,861 votes cast in a far-less-competitive Democratic Primary.
The section of the Atlas that includes primary returns for US President have been updated to include official results from Presidential Primaries in the 2004 Democratic contest (county maps, congressional district maps, and data). All caucus events and several primary events were run by the Democratic party and therefore these results are obtained from the respective state Democratic Party organizations (and not from official state election agencies). In some cases, these data are incomplete due to the inability to obtain final and complete data from the state parties. A complete spreadsheet of the data is available for purchase from the store page.
