Talk Elections

I've been working on creating historic Alaska maps by the election day precinct winner and total estimated Borough/Census Area (a.k.a. Alaska County Equivalent). Eventually, I hope to do map the Presidential general elections back to 1960 - but, for now, I've run into a roadblock in getting even the legal descriptions of the pre-1996 precincts.

Here's the maps of the 1996-2016 Election Day in-precinct vote. First, 1996 (Dole v. Clinton). This was Bill Clinton's reelection. Perot ran again, getting about 11% of the statewide ED vote, but not winning any precinct:

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Next, 2000 (Bush v. Gore). Bush won handily, especially since Nader made inroads into many typically Democratic-leaning precincts. He actually won the Talkeetna, Girdwood and Haines Chilkat-Peninsula precincts. Buchanan supposedly won an precinct, but this might be an error:

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The 2004 Bush v. Kerry race wasn't even close, as the map confirms. But because of the lack of a Nader split vote, Kerry won more precincts in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas, like Downtown Anchorage:

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In 2008, John McCain and his Alaskan running mate, Sarah Palin, also won big:

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Obama did better in his 2012 reelection campaign, cracking 40% of the election day vote. Rural Alaska really started swinging Democratic here:

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Finally, the Trump 2016 map looks a lot like the 2012 map. Trump and Clinton's percentages suffered compared to 2012, as third party candidates received more of the vote. Johnson garnered over 6% of the election day in-precinct vote:

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Here's a gif of the 1996-2016 Presidential Election Results maps, which illustrates how the map changed from cycle to cycle:

() (https://uselectionatlas.org/gif/1996-2016-alaska-election-day-in-precinct-vote-map-D7i1wf)

County Equivalent Maps:
1960:
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1964:
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1968:
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1972:
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1976:
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1980:
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1984:
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1988:
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1992:
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1996:
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2000:
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2004 (ED Estimate only, for now):
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2008:
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2012:
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2016:
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GIF of 1960-2016:
() (https://uselectionatlas.org/gif/alaska-county-equivalent-presidential-vote-1960-2016-R_94N0)

Swing Maps:

1992-96:
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1996-2000:
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2000-04 (Election Day Vote):
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2004-08 (Election Day Vote):
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2008-12:
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2012-16:
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1996-2016 GIF:
() (https://uselectionatlas.org/gif/alaska-1996-2016-presidential-vote-swing-gif-dZiBMg)

Great work! Must've been difficult to find precinct data. Alaska is certainly the hardest state to map by far.

Very excited for county equivalents too!

Alaska precinct data is very easy to find - the Division of Elections' website has it for every election back to statehood. It's not in the greatest of formats, but I can format it. 2000 precinct data was mysteriously missing, but I found it on Archive.org.

What's difficult is finding historic shapefiles with precincts - or even the legal description of the pre-96 precincts.

So, I've hit a roadblock in making the 1992 election precinct map. The 1992 Alaska map was an interim one, which may or may not have been similar to 1996 and 2000. That should be a very interesting map, with Perot winning a good number of precincts. I can't think of a solution short of asking the Alaska Division of Elections for that info - if they even have it.

I also noticed an error with the 2008 map - the Prudhoe Bay precinct didn't exist in 08, and is showing up as water. I'll eventually get around to fixing that in the map and gif. It should be colored the same as its neighboring precinct to the east, with which it was combined.

Excellent work, thanks!

Looks like the AK Republican Party is in trouble in the long term.

This is often said, but why?  I think cynic at least poked a legitimate hole in this idea in another thread:

It has trended D in every election since 2004, and Trump underperformed there in 2016 (even though his opponent was an awful fit for the state). The state has also gotten a lot more competitive at the state level as well. I'll believe AK acutally trending back to Rs when I see it.

We don’t really know what’s driving the population growth in the Anchorage exurbs, but these areas don’t seem to have gotten a lot more R in recent years either. I certainly hope I’m wrong, though.

The Democrats have also lost votes in every election since 2008 in Alaska. In fact they have lost more votes than the Republicans have excluding the surge in 2004/2008

I added the 1996-2016 County Equivalent estimated winner and swing maps + gifs in the posts above. Any maps involving 2004 only show election day votes, for now. The 2004 Early Votes were very strangely reported - by election region in most cases, and by groups of HDs sometimes. I can't reconcile the total reported early vote to the official total vote totals - yet.

I read once that in 1980, Libertarian candidate Ed Clark received all 29 votes cast in Chicken, Alaska. Can anyone verify this? I think I read it in Reason magazine.

That's false. Clark received 4 votes in Chicken in 1980 to Reagan's 18 and Carter's 2. So he beat Carter there.

Thank you. (I guess fake news has been around for a while).

The 1992 presidential election in Alaska was interesting. The winner there (Bush) was held to under 40% because Perot received over 28% of the vote. As the map below shows, Perot even won a county equivalent - Denali Borough:

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Perot's statewide weakness was in rural areas off of the road network. He tended to do better in traditionally Republican areas like Mat-Su and Kenai:

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Here's a similar map of the Bush and Clinton percentages by Alaska county equivalent:
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The 1992-96 all-party county equivalent swing map shows wild swings toward both sides, probably due to Perot:
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Unfortunately, I can't make a 1992 precinct map - yet. I don't have the necessary shapefile or even the legal descriptions of the 1992 boundaries to make a shapefile, and the 1992 map is very different from 1996. Perot won 42 of the 469 or so Election Day Precincts. Perot also won the Question vote in a majority of HDs. Of Perot's 42 precincts, 9 were in Kenai, 7 in Mat-Su and 5 each in Fairbanks, Prince of Wales-Hyder and Yukon-Koyukuk. Perot only won 1 Anchorage precinct and 0 in Juneau.

Very cool, I love your work on this.

do you have a blank map of the Alaska precincts?

For what year? Alaska precincts tend to change every cycle or two.

I added the 1960-1998 CE results. So we now have estimates of the total vote by Alaska County Equivalent for all presidential elections since Alaska became a state except for 2004 - which is of ED only for now due to the strange way Absentees were reported. In 1968, some Presidential Only votes weren't broken down by precinct or HD - I did not try to allocate them, either.

Here's the updated 1960-2016 CE gif:
() (https://uselectionatlas.org/gif/alaska-county-equivalent-presidential-vote-1960-2016-R_94N0)

Here's the R-D all-party margin by CE for every cycle since 1960:

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By my estimates, Both the Ds and Rs have won every Alaska CE at least once since statehood.

Threads like this are some of the best on atlas.

could you possibly also show the percentages of the vote in the county equivalents for each year?

I will eventually. I've calculated them, but they're in non-Atlas colors. I'm too lazy to change them over to Atlas colors tonight. If you want a preview, you can look at my RRHElections diary (https://rrhelections.com/index.php/2018/02/02/alaska-results-by-county-equivalent-1960-2016/).

Also, I neglected to say here that all my spreadsheets are downloadable from my Google Drive here (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Cc5AQunjTj03mQx0NVBpY3rQmXbPSWUT).

I might note that the North Slope Borough would have been amongst McGovern’s best county-equivalents – if he got over sixty percent it would be rivalled only by:

	County Equivalent	McGovern	%	Nixon	%	Others	%	Margin	%
#1	Duval County, Texas	3,729	85.68%	623	14.32%	0	0.00%	4,352	71.37%
#2	Shannon County, South Dakota	1,246	77.34%	356	22.10%	9	0.56%	1,611	55.25%
#3	Greene County, Alabama	3,235	68.32%	1,404	29.65%	96	2.03%	4,735	38.67%
#4	Charles City County, Virginia	1,177	67.84%	535	30.84%	23	1.33%	1,735	37.00%
#5	New York (Manhattan) County, New York	354,326	66.25%	178,515	33.38%	2,022	0.38%	534,863	32.87%
#6	Suffolk County, Massachusetts	166,250	65.76%	85,272	33.73%	1,299	0.51%	252,821	32.03%
#7	Elliott County, Kentucky	1,499	65.26%	782	34.04%	16	0.70%	2,297	31.21%
#8	Knott County, Kentucky	2,774	64.71%	1,479	34.50%	34	0.79%	4,287	30.21%
#9	Macon County, Alabama	3,636	62.21%	1,931	33.04%	278	4.76%	5,845	29.17%
#10	Menominee County, Wisconsin	608	62.30%	355	36.37%	13	1.33%	976	25.92%
#11	Saint Louis City, Missouri	119,817	62.33%	72,402	37.67%			192,219	24.67%
#12	Deer Lodge County, Montana	3,979	60.25%	2,373	35.93%	252	3.82%	6,604	24.32%

Checking the figures, North Slope would have been McGovern’s eleventh-strongest county-equivalent by margin – given its majority-minority status, not remarkable of course as six of then ten above it and the District of Columbia are also majority-minority.

Looking at the results table, Wade-Hampton’s shift from McGovern to Ford was replicated in the Lower 48 only by:

• Pitkin County, Colorado
• Washtenaw County, Michigan
• Clay County, South Dakota

I've put interactive versions of the 1996-2016 Alaska Presidential Results precinct maps online here (https://thecinyc.com/alaska-pres-precinct-maps) (for PCs) and here (https://thecinyc.com/alaska-maps-for-phones) (for iPads & Cell Phones).

Since Alaska doesn't break down the early/absentee/question vote by precinct, the maps are of the in-precinct election day vote only. Note that these maps are in reverse Atlas colors.

Anchorage has been turning democratic on the down ballot though and it swung D doing 2016
Anchorage has reelected its democratic mayor and voted for Begich both times I am interested to know did Walker carry Anchorage in 2014? Alaska in the long long term like 2032 will become a battle ground state imo

Yes. By my quick math, Walker won the election-day in-precinct Anchorage vote 49-46 and the overall weighted estimate vote 49-45.

I don't agree with your battleground analysis, though. Anchorage might be trending D, but it's stagnant or losing population. Heavily-Republican Mat-Su Borough is still growing.

I soured on this notion from looking at the numbers over the past few elections. When you account for the Palin effect and the unusually large turnout in 2004, Republicans have obtained about 165,000 votes in 2000, 2012 and 2016.

Meanwhile Democrats peaked in 2008 (buried under the Palin surge) and have lost votes ever since.

They won a majority in the alaska state house Clinton was a terrible fit for the state someone better could have picked up votes so there are more alaskan democrats down ballot now for some reason

This thread contains information too useful to let it rot sitting back all the way in page 10 of this board.

Not anymore - and I'm not going to bother to repost anything. So long, Atlas.

They killed your maps????

Wow---- just went and checked and it doesn't look like even Excel Chart images that I created from scratch based upon election precinct data exist anymore.....

So long Atlas indeed..... it's over folks, hope you enjoyed the ride..... :(