Historic Alaska Presidential Results Megathread

[cinyc]

I've been working on creating historic Alaska maps by the election day precinct winner and total estimated Borough/Census Area (a.k.a. Alaska County Equivalent). Eventually, I hope to do map the Presidential general elections back to 1960 - but, for now, I've run into a roadblock in getting even the legal descriptions of the pre-1996 precincts.

Here's the maps of the 1996-2016 Election Day in-precinct vote. First, 1996 (Dole v. Clinton). This was Bill Clinton's reelection. Perot ran again, getting about 11% of the statewide ED vote, but not winning any precinct:



Next, 2000 (Bush v. Gore). Bush won handily, especially since Nader made inroads into many typically Democratic-leaning precincts. He actually won the Talkeetna, Girdwood and Haines Chilkat-Peninsula precincts. Buchanan supposedly won an precinct, but this might be an error:



The 2004 Bush v. Kerry race wasn't even close, as the map confirms. But because of the lack of a Nader split vote, Kerry won more precincts in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas, like Downtown Anchorage:



In 2008, John McCain and his Alaskan running mate, Sarah Palin, also won big:



Obama did better in his 2012 reelection campaign, cracking 40% of the election day vote. Rural Alaska really started swinging Democratic here:



Finally, the Trump 2016 map looks a lot like the 2012 map. Trump and Clinton's percentages suffered compared to 2012, as third party candidates received more of the vote. Johnson garnered over 6% of the election day in-precinct vote:

[cinyc]

Here's a gif of the 1996-2016 Presidential Election Results maps, which illustrates how the map changed from cycle to cycle:

[cinyc]

County Equivalent Maps:
1960:


1964:


1968:


1972:


1976:


1980:


1984:


1988:


1992:


1996:


2000:


2004 (ED Estimate only, for now):


2008:


2012:


2016:


GIF of 1960-2016:

[cinyc]

Swing Maps:

1992-96:


1996-2000:


2000-04 (Election Day Vote):


2004-08 (Election Day Vote):


2008-12:


2012-16:


1996-2016 GIF:

[cinyc]

Great work! Must've been difficult to find precinct data. Alaska is certainly the hardest state to map by far.

Alaska precinct data is very easy to find - the Division of Elections' website has it for every election back to statehood. It's not in the greatest of formats, but I can format it. 2000 precinct data was mysteriously missing, but I found it on Archive.org.

What's difficult is finding historic shapefiles with precincts - or even the legal description of the pre-96 precincts.

So, I've hit a roadblock in making the 1992 election precinct map. The 1992 Alaska map was an interim one, which may or may not have been similar to 1996 and 2000. That should be a very interesting map, with Perot winning a good number of precincts. I can't think of a solution short of asking the Alaska Division of Elections for that info - if they even have it.

I also noticed an error with the 2008 map - the Prudhoe Bay precinct didn't exist in 08, and is showing up as water. I'll eventually get around to fixing that in the map and gif. It should be colored the same as its neighboring precinct to the east, with which it was combined.

[cinyc]

I added the 1996-2016 County Equivalent estimated winner and swing maps + gifs in the posts above. Any maps involving 2004 only show election day votes, for now. The 2004 Early Votes were very strangely reported - by election region in most cases, and by groups of HDs sometimes. I can't reconcile the total reported early vote to the official total vote totals - yet.

[cinyc]

I read once that in 1980, Libertarian candidate Ed Clark received all 29 votes cast in Chicken, Alaska. Can anyone verify this? I think I read it in Reason magazine.

That's false. Clark received 4 votes in Chicken in 1980 to Reagan's 18 and Carter's 2. So he beat Carter there.

[cinyc]

The 1992 presidential election in Alaska was interesting. The winner there (Bush) was held to under 40% because Perot received over 28% of the vote. As the map below shows, Perot even won a county equivalent - Denali Borough:



Perot's statewide weakness was in rural areas off of the road network. He tended to do better in traditionally Republican areas like Mat-Su and Kenai:



Here's a similar map of the Bush and Clinton percentages by Alaska county equivalent:




The 1992-96 all-party county equivalent swing map shows wild swings toward both sides, probably due to Perot:


Unfortunately, I can't make a 1992 precinct map - yet. I don't have the necessary shapefile or even the legal descriptions of the 1992 boundaries to make a shapefile, and the 1992 map is very different from 1996. Perot won 42 of the 469 or so Election Day Precincts. Perot also won the Question vote in a majority of HDs. Of Perot's 42 precincts, 9 were in Kenai, 7 in Mat-Su and 5 each in Fairbanks, Prince of Wales-Hyder and Yukon-Koyukuk. Perot only won 1 Anchorage precinct and 0 in Juneau.

[cinyc]

do you have a blank map of the Alaska precincts?

For what year? Alaska precincts tend to change every cycle or two.

[cinyc]

I added the 1960-1998 CE results. So we now have estimates of the total vote by Alaska County Equivalent for all presidential elections since Alaska became a state except for 2004 - which is of ED only for now due to the strange way Absentees were reported. In 1968, some Presidential Only votes weren't broken down by precinct or HD - I did not try to allocate them, either.

Here's the updated 1960-2016 CE gif:

[cinyc]

Here's the R-D all-party margin by CE for every cycle since 1960:



By my estimates, Both the Ds and Rs have won every Alaska CE at least once since statehood.

[cinyc]

could you possibly also show the percentages of the vote in the county equivalents for each year?

I will eventually. I've calculated them, but they're in non-Atlas colors. I'm too lazy to change them over to Atlas colors tonight. If you want a preview, you can look at my RRHElections diary.

Also, I neglected to say here that all my spreadsheets are downloadable from my Google Drive here.

[cinyc]

I've put interactive versions of the 1996-2016 Alaska Presidential Results precinct maps online here (for PCs) and here (for iPads & Cell Phones).

Since Alaska doesn't break down the early/absentee/question vote by precinct, the maps are of the in-precinct election day vote only. Note that these maps are in reverse Atlas colors.

[cinyc]

Anchorage has been turning democratic on the down ballot though and it swung D doing 2016
Anchorage has reelected its democratic mayor and voted for Begich both times I am interested to know did Walker carry Anchorage in 2014? Alaska in the long long term like 2032 will become a battle ground state imo

Yes. By my quick math, Walker won the election-day in-precinct Anchorage vote 49-46 and the overall weighted estimate vote 49-45.

I don't agree with your battleground analysis, though. Anchorage might be trending D, but it's stagnant or losing population. Heavily-Republican Mat-Su Borough is still growing.

[cinyc]

This thread contains information too useful to let it rot sitting back all the way in page 10 of this board.

Not anymore - and I'm not going to bother to repost anything. So long, Atlas.