On Friday, in my diary "Economic apartheid... with MAPS!", I used the NYT census/google map feature to take a look at some census tracts in Washington, DC around the seat of government. A lot of the surrounds there showed remarkably strong economic growth this past decade, most notably Census Tract 58, with an estimated 1,429 households, which had a median household income of $107,208, for a 105% increase since 2000.
Needless to say, most of the rest of America has not been doing nearly so well. In fact, it's like we're in a whole different country. I just wanted to start off the week by reminding folks of that a little more specifically.
Chicago
Chicago has long been known as America's "Second City", the defining city of the industrial heartland. So how has Chicago been doing this past decade? Not well, it turns out, and it's nearby suburbs even worse:
Chicago's 9% drop in income is just inside single-digit territory, same as it's northern suburban county. But the two counties to the west are well over the mark at 13% and 11% down from the end of the Clinton Era. Things are not looking well in the heartland. Maybe someone should tell the White House? Or at least Rahm Emmanuel?
Dallas
Well, the industrial heartland has been hurting for decades now. We don't really do anything about it. That would be too much "activist government". Like Europe. Or even like America when we built the Interstate system and went to the moon and stuff like that. The Sunbelt is where it's at nowadays, everyone knows that. And nothing says "Sunbelt" like Dallas, right? Even had a TV show named after it. So how's Dallas been doing this past decade? Oh my:
Dallas County's 16% drop in income almost makes Cook County's 9% drop look like paradise! And Plano County's 12% drop is not exactly cheery, either. At least the other two counties in the picture here are only single-digit losers, and Fort Worth's Tarrant County is a mighty big place, too, so its 8% decline would almost pass for cheery news hereabouts. That's only half of Dallas's rate of decline, after all.
After Dallas, just about anything is bound to look good by comparison, and Bellingham/Seattle, a high-tech powerhouse for three decades now would be just the place to go looking, don't you think? Check it out on the flip:
Digby writes about the NYT census/google map and what it helps reveal about the Versailles elite and the rest of us:
Click on the two maps and you will see that average Americans are living very differently than the beltway celebrity millionaires and realistically are as likely to just "go out and get some of that wealth" (as Roger Simon says they should do) as they are to become an Olympic swimmer or a ballerina. Sure, it's possible, but unless you are a really, really great athlete, constructing your future around it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I think it's particularly illuminating to look at DC in context, using the map option that displays income change over the past decade. This is the first decade in like, forever that incomes generally went down (not for the top 1%, of course, but for just about everyone else). But this wasn't universally the case, and the geographic distribution is most revealing. Let's start by looking at DC in a broad, more-than-half-of-the-country overview, and then zoom in:
Now let's look at the census tract figures for four census tracts close to the seats of power:
And five more tracts:
Now, if you lived in this kind of economic environment, how out of touch with average Americans would you be?
Now add on 24/7 corporate propaganda, and more lobbyists per square inch than anywhere in at least 10 light years or so, and, well, you get the picture. There's just no way these people can possibly have a clue... that they don't have a clue.
To follow up the series on Virginia, I've posted a few recent presidential elections in the state (courtesy of the New York Times). Each map comes with some brief analysis.
Capitalizing on a decade of Democratic movement, Senator Barack Obama becomes the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia since 1964. The Senator performs best in eastern Virginia, especially the fast-growing northern Virginia metropolis. Western Virginia is not as enamored; parts of it even vote more Republican.
A few maps of Pennsylvania's presidential elections are posted below, for your enjoyment. Each map comes with some brief analysis. Note how in each succeeding election, Democratic margins in the Philadelphia metropolis increase, while their margins in the Pittsburgh corridor decrease.
(Note: Because the Times stopped updating before all absentee/provisional ballots were counted, this map does not fully reflect the actual results. I have corrected the discrepancy.)
As the national tide increasingly turns in Senator Barack Obama's favor, Senator John McCain mounts a quixotic attempt to win Pennsylvania. While Mr. McCain improves in the southeastern rustbelt, Democratic dominance in eastern Pennsylvania ensures a double-digit blue margin.
A few maps of Ohio's presidential elections are posted below, for your enjoyment. Each map comes with some brief analysis.
(Note: Because the Times stopped updating before all absentee/provisional ballots were counted, this map does not fully reflect the actual results. I have corrected the discrepancy.)
Senator Barack Obama wins Ohio by 4.6%, a solid but unimpressive victory. Mr. Obama performs poorly in traditional Democratic areas - the northeast and even Cleveland - but offsets this with unique strength in Columbus and Cincinnati. Senator McCain runs strongly in the Republican base.
For your enjoyment, a few maps of Florida elections are posted below.
Barack Obama beats John McCain, 50.91% to 48.10%. Notice how well he does in Jacksonville, Orlando, and Miami. On the other hand, John McCain is absolutely dominating the north, where he improved on Bush in a number of smaller counties.
In this diary series, we've cycled through just about every ethnic group with available data. But there's one left: "Americans" - and the quotation marks are there for a reason.
In practice I am defining this group as whites who did not list an ancestry or listed American or United States as ancestry on the census form. Very few non-whites list American as an ancestry. There is also a correlation between the percent whites who list American ancestry and whites who do not list any ancestry, which is why I lumped them all together.
Who are these "Americans"? We can't tell, but there's lots of possible reasons to fall into this category: too many ancestries to list, unknown ancestry, patriotism, annoyance with labels, privacy concerns, getting bored filling out the census form, and sheer contrariness come to mind.
No matter, one thing is clear: nationwide, on average, the more whites describe themselves as "Americans" in a county, the less support for Obama among whites.
It's easy to shift into shorthand when looking at demographic data and start talking about how Group A or Group B 'votes for Obama' or 'is Democratic.' Generally we all know that we really mean only that a majority of said population behaves that way, but the words still leave behind a bit of the impression that all people in Group A vote the same way. Especially if we hear in the media over and over and over and over and over that, for instance, white working class voters won't vote for Democrats anymore.
Perhaps the most justified statement of this sort is "African-Americans voted for Obama." When the exit polls say 95% did, indeed, vote for Obama, that seems to be pretty safe.
I'm going to start off even more extreme though - here's a map of election results from Chicago: there were a whopping 87 precincts where Obama had exactly 100% of the vote (shown in pink). They were generally located in African-American neighborhoods.
Click to enlarge.
Follow me below if you're wondering where I'm going with this.
(One year out from the 2010 elections, this is a continuation of a two-week series dreaminonempty is conducting on the demographics of the American electorate - promoted by Chris Bowers)
In 2008, 90% of John McCain's votes came from white voters. However, while the Republican relied primarily on white voters, only 55% of them voted for him.
Coincidentally, 55% is also the percent of babies born in the US in 2008 that were non-Hispanic white, according to Census estimates.
That just doesn't bode well for Republicans.
Here's how it looks:
Click to enlarge.
On the left, results from the 2008 exit polls. On the right, the decreasing share of the US population that is non-Hispanic white. Explanations below the fold.
After a year it's worth looking back to when the United States elected a Democrat to the office of President of the United States with a majority of popular votes, the electoral college, and no input from the Supreme Court for the first time in 32 years. The changes in the behavior and composition of the electorate over those 30 years have been dramatic. The maps below show 2008 results and compare them to 1988.
Click to enlarge.
More maps and analysis for the nostalgic can be found in a diary here.
This diary is the introduction to a series exploring the electorate of 2008.
Not directly, of course. I live on the fourth floor of an old brick apartment building--earthquake reinforced, of course. And so I felt my building sway just slightly. Not that much, really. Nowhere near enough to even begin feeling worried, much less frightened. In fact, so slightly that I wanted it to sway a good deal more. Though, of course, that might mean that someone else, closer to the epicenter, might get hurt. So on second thought. But, then, more tension released now might mean less destruction during the Big One. Yeah, right.
And once the earth stopped shaking, I went to the Recent Earthquake Information page at the Southern California Earthquake Center. And I filled out a form recording where I live and what I experienced. Then I went to see what others had reported. I wasn't thinking ahead, really. So I didn't take a screenshot of the first map that I saw, with just 49 reports from 44 zipcodes, as I recall--and I wasn't one of them, because the map doesn't refresh with each new entry. But I did capture the next update, which looked like this:
And I thought, "Wow! The reports are really pouring in now."
And I thought, "Look at those reports from around Las Vegas. That's so cool! They felt pretty much what I felt at just about the same time, and I know that, even though I don't know them, haven't talked to them, don't even know their names, or anything about them. But I can see that we're connected."
Because I'm old enough to still feel wonder at how connected we can be, even though I've been using computers since 1973. I think of earthquake reporting as doing my civic duty. And looking at the maps afterwards, and feeling connected to everyone else who reported, is my cool reward.
It turns out that one variable that does a good job explaining how well Obama did in a state is how many people identify as white evangelical or born-again christian. Below, we see that Obama's support in a state is closely related to the percentage of voters identifying as white evangelical; on the right, a map of Obama's support among white evangelicals (purple shows the lowest support for Obama):
Click to enlarge.
Below, more details, more maps, more relationships, and how some of this fiddling with numbers might show that the reason Obama underperformed in certain areas is because he didn't campaign there.
This has been a good election for map lovers. The New York Times has a great set of graphics that shows not only results but changes from the previous four elections.
I've put together a few cartograms and gone back to the 1988 election to see what changes we've had in the last 20 years.
Click to enlarge.
Not too much red there anymore, is there? The rest of the maps, and six conclusions to bicker about below.
News 21, a project of the Knight Foundation out of UC Berkley has a new website - What's At Stake in 2008, that looks at policy and politics in America in 2008, and the current state of the American Dream. As part of that project, they've produced these incredible state-by-state maps of the US illustrating youth turnout in 3 major elections: 1972, when young voters first received the right to vote; 1996, the nadir of youth turnout; and 2004, the year that the trends we are seeing come to fruition today first started to gain traction.
Interestingly, it's on a map like this that the importance of election day registration becomes clear. While youth turnout was up across the board in 2004, it was strongest, or at least above average, in states that have some form of election day registration: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon (vote by mail), etc. Other factors, like competitive races, swing state status, and the size of local field ops also make a huge difference, but EDR can increase turnout by 10 - 12% according to studies by Demos.
Of course, the big question on everyone's mind is, what will this map look like in 7 days?
It's been quite a while since I crunched some political numbers, so I thought I'd check back in with a series of diaries. Today, the latest edition of the Bush approval map.
Click to enlarge.
My, that's pretty!
Memo to Democrats: this is an anvil for the falling Republicans. Please use it.
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