Nineteen Sixty Eight

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Been thinking about doing this for a while. Amusing that I only got started when 2008 was coming to a close, but such is life.

Anyway. For anyone interested in the deeper patterns of American society, the 1968 election is endlessly fascinating; heightened sectional, class and racial-ethnic tensions (let's not go into the causes of those right now) and a set of unusually interesting and unusually polarising candidates all play their part in that.

It's also an election that tends to be remembered for the wrong reasons; it's too closely associated with The Emerging Republican Majority, with Working Class support for Nixon four years later (the sheer number of people who seem to think that Nixon won in '68 because of a Working Class backlash to the leftish record Kennedy-Johnson administrations is as astonishing as it is depressing) and so on and so forth.

I've already made US-wide county maps (using standard Atlas colours) for the candidates (look in the "county maps for interesting candidates" thread) so there's no point doing that again... and who-won-what maps don't really suit this election. Besides, the sectional splits confuse certain patterns greatly. So I've split the U.S into three divisions (North, South, West) and worked out some detailed keys based on how well the candidates did in each.

West is done, work continues on the rest.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A bigger, clearer picture is here

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I didn't know New Brunswick was in the West.

I've been thrown by the infernal post-office codes again, I see. It's obvious what I meant anyway

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why did Wallace do that well in parts of Nevada, by the way?

Not a clue. Hardly anyone lived in that area at the time though. Esmeralda especially seems to be a little weird; Perot lost it by one vote in 1992. Sort of like a ghost-county IIRC; was a big gold mining area around the turn of the (19th-20th) century.

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[Filuwaúrdjan]

The South is mostly done now. Gone for a fairly technocratic definition, to avoid certain problems.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A bigger, clearer picture is here

Note that Wallace was not on the ballot in D.C.