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November 8, 2008
Vote swings in rich and poor counties
I got ahold of the county-level election returns from 2008 (as of a few days ago, so lots of precincts missing, but that's what I have to go with for now) and crosstabbed it with county income, dividing the counties into poorest, middle, and upper third, with cutpoints set so that approximately one-third of the U.S. population is in each category.
What happened in each lower, middle-income, and rich America?
Hoo-hoo, interesting! Obama did about the same as Kerry in poor counties, better in most of the middle-income counties, and just about uniformly better in rich counties. (In this and subsequent graphs, the area of the circle is proportional to the number of voters in that county in 2004.)
These patterns are new to 2008. Checking the corresponding plots from 2000/2004 and 1996/2000, we don't see much of anything different comparing poor, middle-income, and rich counties.
The next step is to break things up by region of the country. Here's what we get:
Obama outperformed Kerry in rich counties in all regions of the country. He did better than Kerry in middle-income counties in all regions--except the south. He did better than Kerry in poor counties in the midwest and west but not in the northeast and south.
So, region is part of the story here, but not all of it.
What happened in the two previous elections?
Let's take a look at the swings from 2000 to 2004:
Nothing much here. But what about the 1996/2000 swing?
This is intersesting. Gore held performed about as well as Clinton in most of the middle-income and rich counties but he got nuked in poor counties in all regions of the country. Consistent with the David Brooks story about growing divisions between Red and Blue America.
Posted by Andrew at November 8, 2008 9:25 PM
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