Miles' Election Map Thread

[Miles]

Both of these seem to have been races where the too-conservative guy lost... the cajun primary is back and no Democrat filed, so they were R-R races on a GE turnout. And in that situation you can still be quite easily too conservative.

It was a sort of irony. There are no really moderate Republican officeholders in Louisiana i am aware of. Even moderate conservative... So, frequently, it's a fight between very and extremely conservative candidates. In SUCH situation very conservative candidate (Boustany, for example) can win over extremely conservative (Landry) of course, but that doesn't make him less conservative)))

It makes him less conservative than the other guy. -_-

True...

This is why I'm a centrist.

'Forget ideological purity, its usually a choice between the lesser of two evils now..Boustany vs. Landry would be a good example.

[Miles]

And here we geaux!!

I finally have the precinct data for NC!

Let's start off with one of my favorite results of the night!





Performance Maps:

MCINTYRE


ROUZER

[Miles]

Well, I'm a bit surprised here. I wasn't expecting south Charlotte to trend R. This kinda complicates my "NC-09 will be truly competitive within the next 10 years theory."

Romney's improvement seemed to radiate out from the South Park neighborhood, where I went to high school. South Park is a very wealthy area, so it makes sense that Romney would rebound there.

Generally speaking, Romney was a much better fit for south Charlotte than McCain. Romney's greater appeal coupled with Obama's overperformance there in 2008 made for a pretty noticeable Republican swing.

I was a bit disappointed with my own precinct, 114. If you look at the trend map, near the southern corner of the county, 114 is the light blue one directly on top the bright red precinct that looks like downward-facing crescent.

Despite swinging 20 points to Obama and voting Against Amendment 1, it trended about 4% Republican. Its pretty upper-middle class, though not nearly as wealthy as South Park, and heavily white, so Romney was a good candidate for the precinct.

For reference, here's how my precinct voted in the past:

2000: 66/34 Bush
2004: 67/32 Bush
2008: 57/42 McCain
2012: 61/38 Romney
Amendment 1: 53/47 Against

[Miles]

Does anybody have some precinct level data on Atlanta or metro Atlanta? Obama didn't lose too much ground there and some counties swung towards him, but I'd like to see it broken down.

I haven't done any GA maps in the past, though I'm trying to cobble together GA-12. Maybe after that I'll look at Atlanta. The problem with GA is that the names of the voting districts don't always match the shapefiles that I get from DRA.

Basically with Landrieu, there are a few things. There are a lot of people in some of the bigger parishes, like Livingston, Lafayette and Ouachita who I really don't think would ever vote Democrat. Her base obviously Greater New Orleans; she's been making inroads in other cities, like Baton Rouge, Shreveport and Lake Charles to help offset those three aforementioned parishes. She's also very popular along the River Parishes and along the Delta. The Cajun last name also helps in Acadiana.

[Miles]

Nash County has the distinction of being one of only a handful of McCain -> Obama counties in the country.

[Miles]

Cumberland (Fayetteville) and Robeson (Lumberton) counties, both strongly Democratic, swung to Obama.

Though Robeson was one of Amendment 1's best counties, it swung almost 4 points towards Obama. In fact, while southeastern NC was a very pro-Amendment 1 area, several other counties there actually swung towards Obama too. Ergo, I don't think Obama's stance on marriage was as detrimental to his standing in the state as some were making it out to be.

[Miles]

That's all very fascinating to me, Miles.  What do you think was behind the swing toward Obama in East NC?  It also looks like it was mainly a rural phenomenon save for Fayetteville... 

I think its similar to what happened in the rest of the deep south. McCain was a better fit for those areas than Romney.

[Miles]

Despite being from Johnston County, Rouzer "only" carried it 60/40 over McIntyre while Romney won it 63/36 over Obama.

This compares Romney's margins to Rouzer's:



Romney performed better in every precinct. If Rouzer matched Romney's performance against McIntyre, he would have gone from a 50.1/49.9 loss to a 50.8/49.2 win districtwide.

[Miles]

Happy Friday!

[Miles]

Must be nice to be making precinct maps of a state that didn't redraw its precinct boundaries after the Census. Jealous...

Yes! Its quite a luxury!

[Miles]

My beloved Congressional district:

[Miles]

This was probably the closest State Senate race in the country. Rep. Bill Cook upset Sen. Stan White by 21 votes out of about 87,000 cast.

[Miles]

Yeah, those are good guesses.

Obama lost the Myers Park/South Park area 55/45 in 2008; the statewide average is 62/38 in the R's favor. Obama definitely overperformed there in 2008.
  
Watauga is coming!

[Miles]

The pattern is, predictably, Boone vs. the rest of the county.

Yep. Only 3 precincts trended D, and two of those were in Boone.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?