Comments on: Red Counties, Blue Counties and Occupied Counties

By: Sandy

Sandy — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 22:57:07 +0000

Exit polls tell a slightly different story. Small towns and small cities went 50/50. The only places that went more largely to Bush were suburbs and completely rural voters. Don’t buy into the moral values, rural southerner nonsense. That’s not what’s happening. Suburban people want their tax cuts, farmers want their subsidies. That’s all the more complicated we need to make this.

By: x

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 08:11:54 +0000

test

By: Conrad Kilroy

Conrad Kilroy — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 03:47:44 +0000

I showed my expert friend this and his response was, “Among us, I think their cartograms are crappy. They overgeneralize the polygons, i.e. take out many intermediate points along the boundaries to make the computation faster. Our group wrote a competing article today with pictures that use our method: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/ If you are a blogger feel free to link to this site.” -Michael Gastner, Ph.D. Student. Physics Department, UofMich

By: Obsidian

Obsidian — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 01:14:15 +0000

I made a bunch of maps you might like here: http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/2004/11/red-and-blue-reprise-2004.html I try to show population density and vote at the same time. One point, the naive red-to-blue maps almost always present an inaccurate picture, because color perception is very tricky. In short: America is not purple.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 05:51:25 +0000

“prarie dog and cowpat” vote? Yep, us sister fxxxing hicks just made first class jackasses out of you city slickers! Oh I give up. Did you even read the post? The point is that prairie dogs and cowpats and large tracts of open rangeland don’t vote. People do. So coloring huge sections of America red doesn’t mean anything when hardly anyone lives in them, when the electorate is pretty closely split, or both. If you just want to fling abuse you can bugger off somewhere else.

By: Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 05:43:24 +0000

I don’t give a damn about rural america, and will do everything I can to make sure none of my wealth gets transferred to ease their poverty, their ignorance, and their obesity. Oddly enough, I just wrote a screed on that sort of offensive silliness.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 04:22:25 +0000

“prarie dog and cowpat” vote? Yep, us sister fxxxing hicks just made first class jackasses out of you city slickers! Face it, you sore loser, MORE of us chose President Bush over your gigolo. So why don’t you just shuffle on down to your big city corner and buy yourself some crack to drown your sorrows in?

By: Suresh

Suresh — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 03:53:59 +0000

Here’s a cartogram version of Purple Haze (the cartograms are generated by county, rather than by state) http://geomblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/purple-map-revisited.html

By: Lukas

Lukas — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 23:27:07 +0000

Yes, the Senate is a big problem. Wyoming has the same number of senators as California? Rotten boroughs, anybody?

By: Marion

Marion — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 21:39:25 +0000

Check this map out, it’s even more telling: http://www.esri.com/industries/elections/graphics/results_2004_lg.jpg

By: Brian C.B.

Brian C.B. — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 21:20:22 +0000

The blue in South Carolina isn’t Charleston. Charleston County is reddish-purple, because it’s rural and urban African-American population is balanced by a while population in the county’s outer, suburban, reaches. The blue is probably Orangeburg, part of the Black Belt, the string of midland counties that you’ll note continues to the Mississippi. These are counties containing a considerable part of the South’s rural African-American population. As for Daschle’s judicial appointments strategy, that appeared to be “approve hundreds of nominations, deny four to six.” After two years of this talk, and this election, the mask of victimhood is beginning to slip.

By: Brian R.

Brian R. — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 14:42:45 +0000

Surely,the USA Today map is a distortion of the views of the American electorate in one sense especially in terms of the House of Representatives. On the other hand, it is very reflective of a major problem for Democrats in terms of the Senate. Democrats can dream of getting rid of the EC, but the Senate is not going away(neither is the EC). As the red/blue map shows, Republicans are a real threat to reach the magical 60 seats in the Senate. Senators have a long memory. Therefore, Daschle’s judicial strategy will come back to haunt Democrats, because Republicans will exact a payback in some form.

By: john b

john b — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 12:11:00 +0000

The intelligence chart isn’t exactly fake, but it’s bad statistics – it uses income as a proxy for IQ.

By: Anders

Anders — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 10:02:16 +0000

Here’s an interesting tabulation of the results versus state population average IQ. I have no way of verifying the data, but either scary or funny (if not true) http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm

By: Zizka

Zizka — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 05:49:02 +0000

What is urban and what is rural? Definitions vary. As I understand, the US census uses a strict definition of “rural” which makes the US 90% urban. Besides the urban/ rural split, I think proximity to a university defines a place. IE, two cities of 50,000 will be completely different in nature depending on whether they have universities or not. The one without will be much more rural.