Map of Countywide Elected Officials, 2011-2015

[Adam Griffin]

I originally started this close to two years ago by doing the results of each countywide race in Georgia in 2012. In the summer of last year, I decided to do MS in the run-up to the 2015 elections. Later, I did South Carolina.

Recently, I've compiled three more states and am probably going to (slowly but surely) complete the map as much as possible. I wanted to get the Solid South completed, but TN, AL & KY (if you want to call it Southern) do not keep county-level results on their websites. As such, I've completed six states thus far:

If Imgur links do not display the image after clicking, then click on the URL in your browser and hit 'enter' to load it again, or hit refresh. Stupid Imgur is blocking direct links from Atlas but once you do that, it should work.

• Arkansas (All)
• Florida (All)
• Georgia (All)
• Louisiana (All)
• Maryland (All)
• Mississippi (2011)
• North Carolina (2014)
• South Carolina (2014)
• Virginia (All; Incomplete)
• West Virginia (2012)

The maps above use the "Blue = Democratic & Red = Republican" color scheme. The map below, however, uses standard Atlas colors.

Don't cry for Southron Democrats just yet:

Full-size image

[Adam Griffin]

Thanks a lot! The only problem -i don't see pictures on imgur (empty screen). Snag.gy links work fine for me...

Click on the URL in your browser and hit 'enter' to load it again, or hit refresh. Stupid Imgur is blocking direct links from Atlas but once you do that, it should work.

[Adam Griffin]

Thanks a lot! The only problem -i don't see pictures on imgur (empty screen). Snag.gy links work fine for me...

Click on the URL in your browser and hit 'enter' to load it again, or hit refresh. Stupid Imgur is blocking direct links from Atlas but once you do that, it should work.

Thanks, it works! But i don't see an explanation of abbreviations for Louisiana (though i can make an educated guess about most)...

P.S. Of special interest to me there are 2 main regions: South (especially - Deep South and surrounding areas, like Northern Florida and Arkansas) and New England. I hope to see something about them in the future (and remain thankful for those you already made)

I had actually starting working on Florida last night, as luck would have it!


Florida has now been added to the map.

[Adam Griffin]

P.S. Waiting for  Arkansas, where Democrats cratered recently not only on Presidential, but on Congressional and even state legislative level. Would like to get at least some information about Alabama too (the same situation), bit if it's impossible - .....

I spent over an hour last night trying to (again) dig through potential sources for AL countywide election results. I first attempted to track them down through each county's website...but a lot of counties either don't have websites or don't have the results listed. I then went back and really dug through AL SoS' offerings, and buried within one obscure section, I found election results for 2012 and 2014. In the case of 2012, the results by precinct and the partisan affiliations are there, but not many countywide offices seem to be elected in presidential years there. For most counties, it was only 2 or 3 offices (usually 1 or 2 each of School Boards & County Commissions).

Turning to the 2014 spreadsheet, all of the results are there...but partisan affiliation is not included in the spreadsheet (for whatever reason!). Therefore, I know who won but I have no idea who is a D and who is a R. Even though I was happy to find the actual county-level results that I could not find previously for AL, they are still functionally useless and it would take tons of time to track down the affiliations of each, and even then, I'm sure there'd be plenty of holes where there is no internet reference to various officials' affiliations.

[Adam Griffin]

Just added (most of) Virginia. Barring the significantly-populated ones, I eliminated cities from this measurement. Virginia is just...exhausting for me. I don't know why: I'm guessing the combination of counties/municipalities paired with the frustrating map parameters (whether you're using shapefiles or hand-drawn ones). Additionally and here, the # of counties that have transitioned to all non-partisan/independent offices makes it tedious and throws off the map's flow.

My original metric for measuring partisan control this has been put to the test here; there are several counties where all but one office are held by independents/non-partisans, and as such, those counties are colored "sweeps" for the party with literally one office-holder. Throughout the Deep South, this isn't an issue.

At any rate, I need a break from Virginia, so I've uploaded my progress thus far and will come back to it sooner or later. Ugh, I'd rather do Texas when it comes to county-level map machinations than Virginia.

[Adam Griffin]

Great job, Griff!

I am, however, wondering why Wilson County, NC is left blank for the 2014 countywide office election results. If you need them, they are as follows:

Clerk of Superior Court - D
Sheriff - D
Board of Commissioners - 4 D; 3 R (7 total)
Board of Education - 4 Nonpartisan (3 elected in other year)
Soil and Water - 2 Nonpartisan

Their Register of Deeds was elected in 2012 and they don't have an elected Tax Commissioner.

You know, what I think happened was that I clicked the wrong setting on the website (perhaps referendums or whatever) and it showed no election results. I'll correct that shortly. Thanks!

One word - thanks!

You're welcome!


Up next: Arkansas

[Adam Griffin]

Arkansas has been added.

For some of those counties, we have to take it with a grain of salt. Why? Because for some damn reason, the SoS only shows 1 or 2 offices being up for election in both 2012 and 2014. I noticed that in some cases, there was an "unopposed races" entry in the results, but I also observed many counties with officers listed that were not opposed, so it doesn't appear to be a case of "we're only going to show the elections if there was competition". I have no idea why this is, but I decided to proceed with completing the state, anyway.

I sometimes gripe about my GOP SoS, but the more I see from other states...the more I realize that Georgia has one of the most comprehensive and straightforward sets of election results, voter registration/turnout statistics and easily-accessible voter/elections information in the country.

[Adam Griffin]

P.S. What next? Texas with it's myriad of counties?

Ugh, I have no idea. Even though the South has tons of counties, it's sort of "familiar" to me in terms of geography and the lack of monotony. In any direction from here, I run into one set of problems or another.

With TX, the issue is file size. Since I'm having to manually extract the data for a lot of states, I don't save any time by using shapefiles (hence why my maps have been hand-drawn for this). To make a template for TX that's big enough to fit the data into it, it'll be something like 6000x4500 pixels. Immense. I mean, it'll probably be OK but it'll crash older computers.

Moving NW (into the Great Plains and Midwest) is a personal nightmare for me because of the lack of variance in county shapes. It just bores the hell out of me...the number of counties and the fact that most are just silly squares.

I probably need to finish Virginia first (I hate VA - my least favorite state to do because of city issue, number of counties, coloration difficulty on hand-drawn maps, etc). I *probably* will continue moving NE in the short-term and try to finish the mid-Atlantic and New England before going any further west.

[Adam Griffin]

Maryland has now been added.

[Adam Griffin]

P.S. What next? Texas with it's myriad of counties?

Ugh, I have no idea. Even though the South has tons of counties, it's sort of "familiar" to me in terms of geography and the lack of monotony. In any direction from here, I run into one set of problems or another.

With TX, the issue is file size. Since I'm having to manually extract the data for a lot of states, I don't save any time by using shapefiles (hence why my maps have been hand-drawn for this). To make a template for TX that's big enough to fit the data into it, it'll be something like 6000x4500 pixels. Immense. I mean, it'll probably be OK but it'll crash older computers.

If you use QGIS you can join spreadsheets to shapefiles.

If the data was already compiled in an effective format (at least for me), I would definitely be doing something like that (I usually just use Google Fusion Tables, since I have yet to get the learn how to get CartoDB's system to not geocode random columns that have nothing to do with coordinates). It's so relatively quick to just eye-ball, count, and color at this point since I'm needing to extract the results manually, anyway. Presumably I am going to at least create a FT map with the percentage of offices held by each party in each county, but I understand that's not going to be as interesting necessarily.


I have now finished the 2014 elections for Georgia and have merged 2012/2014 into one map.

[Adam Griffin]

Are most of these Democrats probably as conservative as Republicans, or do they hang onto some vestiges of their party's stances?

It's a mixed bag for the most part. Some of them are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who (regardless of personal beliefs) still vote straight-ticket Democratic - though they won't necessarily advertise that.

Others are those who are merely opportunists, running as Democrats because political gravity has held on for so long with respect to Democratic primary influence (see below) and will continue to do so until/unless they're forced to flip, which they'll do without regret. Some of those opportunists are in a position where they would absolutely love to flip, but they believe that they cannot win a GOP primary even as an incumbent after they make the flip, so they continue to take their chances as Democrats.

Another group are people who you'd most aptly identify as "Dixiecrats" or legitimate independents: they're conservative and their voting records reflect that (straight-ticket GOP in presidential primaries and straight Dem in local/state primaries; this behavior often crosses over to the opportunists as well, so nobody can attack them for voting for national Democrats in campaigns).

If the Democratic Party brand is so irrevocably broken in the rural South, then why do Democrats still do well at the county level in states like Mississippi?  I think Griff is largely right with his analysis to some extent concerning blind hatred for the Dems, but I do find it odd that many of those folks still vote Democratic at some level, leading me to think that Democrats could revive in those parts at some point.

The power of incumbency is a terribly mighty thing to behold. A lot of these office-holders have been in office for decades (keep in mind that for a variety of reasons, a lot of Deep South Dems in decades past would get elected to office at shockingly young ages); they're "good people" and everybody knows them. At the local level with regard to state parties, you're dealing with a "every man for himself" sort of situation with respect to political party organization and operation in the Deep South, which is seeded with far too many counties. These areas were never competitive, and the "breakthrough" or dominance at the state level for the Republican Party in many cases has only occurred in the past 10 years or so. Resources haven't flowed in here, and because time largely stands still, a compounding series of events prevents Republicans from doing well.

Think about it this way (putting it in quotes so it's condensed in size):

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What do you think is going to happen in that situation by default? The same thing that has always happened.

Though I will say (and there are literally hundreds of examples around the South), there have been and will come times where a series of factors line up perfectly: a GOP county party gets organized, outside assistance begins to come in to some degree, a slate of good candidates are recruited to run as Republicans, and the collective voter hive-mind suddenly snaps and realizes that the Dem primary doesn't have to be the general election. In almost every case where that series of factors has occurred, the Dems are almost or universally purged from local elected office within a matter of 2-4 years (excluding the ones who negotiate with the GOP to defect to save their hides).