2000-2012 National County Swing Map

[minionofmidas]

Hours and hours of innocent fun!

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Mississippi is strange on that map.

P.S: Any prospect of a 1988-2012 swing map?

[minionofmidas]

Mississippi is strange on that map.

Most people don't know that, but Mississippi has supermajority white parts and these parts had a considerable, if minority, Democratic vote up until 2004. Those are hard swings in the corners.
Oh, and Black turnout was lower than White for a very long time - contrast Louisiana where that wasn't the case.
If Dems had somehow managed to get the Black turnout up without alienating their hillbilly voters (both in the quasi-Appalachian Northeast corner and in the Piney Belt - an area just north of the coastal counties (continuing into Alabama) that was largely uninhabited between Indian Removal and the latter 19th century, btw - you'd be looking at a genuine swing state now.

P.S: Any prospect of a 1988-2012 swing map?

That would definitely take a new color scheme. Given how hard some of those dark shades in the Atlas Standard Key are to differentiate anyways, I didn't go past +30 (American terminology, so really +15)... but some of those Appalachian swings are much higher, a few over twice that. There's counties that Gore and Romney both got about 2/3 of the vote in. With 1988 to 2012, even more of the map'd be a sea of dark colors without a new color scheme.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, fascinating, if basically pretty depressing.

[minionofmidas]

Ah, fascinating, if basically pretty depressing.

Some details are perfectly strange. I mean, Kennebec as the only county in Maine where Romney did better than Bush'04?

And some are just hilarious, like all those pink or light blue islands in seas of dark blue that happen to be the population centres.

[Ty440]

Hours and hours of innocent fun!

Muy Bien! Gracias  for your effort!

[YL]

I presume it's been discussed before, but it's curious how the big swinging area in Appalachia seems to stop abruptly at the North Carolina/Tennessee border.

What's going on with the three darkish blue counties in Massachusetts?

[Sol]

I presume it's been discussed before, but it's curious how the big swinging area in Appalachia seems to stop abruptly at the North Carolina/Tennessee border.

What's going on with the three darkish blue counties in Massachusetts?

The border roughly coincides with areas of coal production.

[Badger]

AZ is the big surprise here to me. So much for this being a 'swing state' in the immediate future.

[mileslunn]

The two areas that stand out are the heavily Mormon areas which not a total surprise considering Romney is a Mormon.  I suspect with any other candidate the swings wouldn't have favored the GOP although they still would have gone heavily GOP.  It seems in the southern areas, not just coal country, but elsewhere where it is overwhelmingly white, it swung heavily towards the GOP.  I know Gore did slightly better amongst whites than Obama in 2012, but I wonder if much of that is due to loss of southern whites thus not costing Obama any states that mattered anyways.  After Gore was a southern white himself and it seems whenever you have a southern white on the ticket, the Dems tend to do better amongst them; this was especially true with Carter and Clinton, but also the long-term trend as heavily towards the GOP amongst this group as it seems in the Mid South some places such as Middle Tennessee, Northeastern Arkansas, or Southeastern Oklahoma voted Democrat more out of tradition then anything else so as some of the older voters from the Solid South era die off it would make sense to see this swing.  Also Southeastern Pennsylvania which is partly in coal country seems to be the one area outside the South that has swung heavily over to the GOP. 

[minionofmidas]

AZ is the big surprise here to me. So much for this being a 'swing state' in the immediate future.

Remember this, though

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=164507.msg3529902#new

I'll update this map once we have actual final results from absolutely everywhere.

[memphis]

The hard swing in NE MS is part of the TN valley. Nowhere in America was improved as much by the New Deal. People out there had no phones or electricity before FDR. They were still getting malaria and diseases of malnutrition like rickets and pellagra.  The TVA came in brought these folks up to a more modern way of life.  And that's why whites were voting strongly Democratic in rural areas all around the Tennessee River for many decades. Amazing what "gifts" can do.  It takes a long time for the collective memory of an experience like that to fade, but it finally has. It will be interesting to see if health care reform can generate similar results.  It's a little bit more of an abstract concept than electricity. The rest of MS is just blacks having a higher birthrate than whites.

[Antonio the Sixth]

This is amazing!!! Thanks Lewis!

[minionofmidas]

Updated map.



This is definitely not yet the final data on Massachusetts, and possibly elsewhere, but I didn't want to wait any longer.

While I was at it I caught an error in the Atlas, too (Waupaca Co, WI. It's corrected here and I've pm'ed Dave! )
Oh, and I caught two earlier errors of mine and I don't even want to know how many are left - it's not as if I doublechecked the many areas where nothing changed.

[Antonio the Sixth]

You are awesome, Lewis.

[Skill and Chance]

Great mapping job!  Looking at it from this angle, the "rural D collapse" narrative seems overrated as there is actually a significant portion of the rural north and west that has in fact been moving Democratic more than the nation.  It's more of a strictly rural South phenomenon.

[Sbane]

I wonder what a map of the two party vote would look like. Obama's performance in the west is a bit overstated I think.

[Sbane]

Someone with a better knowledge of Kentucky than me, could you explain why the central part of the state did not trend that Republican like the rest of the state? Eastern Kentucky is explainable, but what about western Kentucky? Or is that another pocket of continued Democratic support in the mid south, such as West Virginia and Arkansas?

[minionofmidas]

I wonder what a map of the two party vote would look like. Obama's performance in the west is a bit overstated I think.

Not that badly.

Nader in western (incl. plains) states mapped
5   Montana     5.95%
6   Hawaii     5.88%
8   Colorado         5.25%
11   Oregon    5.04%
12   Utah    4.65%
14   Washington     4.14%
16   California     3.82%
19   New Mexico     3.55%
20   Nebraska     3.52%
21   Kansas     3.37%
22   North Dakota        3.29%
23   Arizona         2.98%
28   Nevada        2.46%
29   Idaho         2.45%
34   Wyoming     2.12%
and no ballot access in South Dakota.

Central Kentucky does not sit atop of coal like both the east and the west do, you see. Also, the southern part of it is so heavily ancestrally Republican that Democrats could hardly have fallen any further, and north of that you get the most urban areas of the state, Louisville, Lexington, the cincy suburbs, even Frankfort.

[Landslide Lyndon]

North Dakota, Montana and Idaho seem to have some pretty impressive swings to the Democrats. With the exception of Montana I'd expect them to go to the opposite direction.
Any explanation?

[Sbane]

Diffusion of gun control as an issue?

[Tender Branson]

While that is really cool, could you also do a trend map ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

North Dakota, Montana and Idaho seem to have some pretty impressive swings to the Democrats. With the exception of Montana I'd expect them to go to the opposite direction.
Any explanation?

I'll repost that from another thread:

Let's not forget that 2000 was a horrible year for Democrats in the Mountain West. Look, just look at the 1996-2000 trend map:



As much as Democrats might have gained from 2004 on, they aren't even close to their pre-2000 levels there.

[old timey villain]

Someone with a better knowledge of Kentucky than me, could you explain why the central part of the state did not trend that Republican like the rest of the state? Eastern Kentucky is explainable, but what about western Kentucky? Or is that another pocket of continued Democratic support in the mid south, such as West Virginia and Arkansas?

Central Kentucky has always been Republican

[hopper]

Surprised the South Tip of Texas as is Republican as it is and Atlantic County, NJ swung Republican. I thought the Black Population  and maybe even some lower class whites in Atlantic City was really swinging the county in a Dem direction.