Those ME numbers are definitely fishy. Not buying that Clinton did worse in the suburbs than in the rural areas there.
But thanks for doing this.
Maine does look a bit odd, especially when contrasted against the election result by Township that Dave has available for us....
To be fair, there wasn't a major gap between the "suburban" and "rural" areas in the exit poll results for Maine, so even if somehow the math "adds up" it would likely be more a result of what type of coding was used to separate these two communities than anything else (Cities < 5k = rural unless they are directly connected to a Town > 10k
?)
Now what stands out here is that only 6% of the respondents identified as "urban" in the exit poll, which would appear to only include voters within the City of Portland itself, with 51% suburban and 43% rural....
A good chunk of these "suburban" voters likely reside in the areas immediately around Portland (Heavily Clinton), Lewiston & Auburn (Narrow HRC combined), Bangor/Orono/Old Town City (Moderate HRC)....
What might be an interesting exercise, since Maine does break down its data into very specific townships would be if someone could go through the exercise of coding "suburban" towns/townships amounting to 51% of the vote starting with drilling down all of the larger incorporated towns and then throwing in some surrounding townships that are within likely standard commuting range of these larger towns to see what the numbers look like....
The only way these "rural" numbers would make sense would be if some of these SE Coastal towns were included as "rural", since otherwise it would be hard to get close to a 45-47 Trump win number from rural areas (43% of statewide vote).
I mean there simply aren't enough votes from the areas around Bar Harbor/Camden/Rockland, some historically French-Canadian Democratic parts of Northern Maine (Where there were some huge swings towards Trump), some isolated spots like Farmington, Bethel, Native American Reservations, etc to overcome what appears to be a pretty solid Trump victory in Northern and Inland parts of the State, without inclusion of some of these SE Maine Coastal communities that appear to be more defined cities (suburban in Maine speak) than "rural.
Thoughts anyone or does someone with more knowledge, skills, and experience in the political geography of Maine want to attempt to code townships to see what might explain this, other than perhaps inaccurate exit polling data based upon limited sample size of rural Maine?
