https://www.dailykos.com/story/2014...ted-with-interactive-maps?detail=emailclassic
Get used to it you old red faced bitches....
Sun Mar 09, 2014 at 11:19 AM PDT
[h=2]The demographic underpinnings behind America's blue shift, illustrated with interactive maps[/h] by David JarmanFollow for Daily Kos Elections
Net racial change since 1990
If you've been around for a few decades' worth of presidential elections, you probably have a strong sense of which parts of the country are trending toward or away from the two political parties. California has gone from swing state to blue state; Virginia has gone from red state to swing state; Tennessee has gone from swing state to red state; West Virginia didn't even bother to pause at swing state en route to switching from blue state to red state.
But why would that happen, in a country with nationalized campaigns, run mostly on nationwide media? Shouldn't the swing from election to election, from place to place, be pretty uniform? Well, no: The population of each state, and the characteristics of the people living there, constantly change. And knowing that different categories of people—whether it's based on race, or education, or religion, or marital status—are considerably more likely to vote a particular way, then it stands to reason that as the mix of people changes from place to place, so too will the way that place votes.
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post based around an interactive map that looked at how the presidential vote had changed at the county level over the last two decades, not in terms of percentage change like usual, but in terms of the raw number of votes. This showed how the changing geographical pattern of votes—huge numeric gains for the Democrats in the nation's most populous counties, while smaller gains for the Republicans were spread out across the nation's rural and exurban areas—is a huge boost for Democrats' chances in presidential elections but also (thanks to the increased consolidation of more and more Democrats in fewer and fewer places) makes control of the House more difficult.
While it looked cool, I later realized that it was missing an important component: the "why" aspect, explaining who moved into or out of those various places (or, just as importantly, aged into the electorate or died out of it). It occurred to me that I could use the exact same method, looking at the net change in, say, white residents versus non-white residents, or college-educated residents versus non-college-educated residents, over the same two-decade period. Most likely, it would show that the places that had tremendous growth in non-white residents or college-educated residents would be the same places that showed tremendous growth in Democratic votes. Did it? Follow over the fold to find out ...
The short answer is, yes, of course it did—although much more noticeably so with race than it did with education. The first map that we'll look at, right below, looks at these changes in racial composition. The counties that show up in blue are the ones where the gain in non-white residents between the 1990 and 2010 censuses outstripped the gain in white residents, while the counties that show up in red are the ones where the gain in white residents in that 20-year period outstripped the gain in non-white residents.
Get used to it you old red faced bitches....
Sun Mar 09, 2014 at 11:19 AM PDT
[h=2]The demographic underpinnings behind America's blue shift, illustrated with interactive maps[/h] by David JarmanFollow for Daily Kos Elections
If you've been around for a few decades' worth of presidential elections, you probably have a strong sense of which parts of the country are trending toward or away from the two political parties. California has gone from swing state to blue state; Virginia has gone from red state to swing state; Tennessee has gone from swing state to red state; West Virginia didn't even bother to pause at swing state en route to switching from blue state to red state.
But why would that happen, in a country with nationalized campaigns, run mostly on nationwide media? Shouldn't the swing from election to election, from place to place, be pretty uniform? Well, no: The population of each state, and the characteristics of the people living there, constantly change. And knowing that different categories of people—whether it's based on race, or education, or religion, or marital status—are considerably more likely to vote a particular way, then it stands to reason that as the mix of people changes from place to place, so too will the way that place votes.
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post based around an interactive map that looked at how the presidential vote had changed at the county level over the last two decades, not in terms of percentage change like usual, but in terms of the raw number of votes. This showed how the changing geographical pattern of votes—huge numeric gains for the Democrats in the nation's most populous counties, while smaller gains for the Republicans were spread out across the nation's rural and exurban areas—is a huge boost for Democrats' chances in presidential elections but also (thanks to the increased consolidation of more and more Democrats in fewer and fewer places) makes control of the House more difficult.
While it looked cool, I later realized that it was missing an important component: the "why" aspect, explaining who moved into or out of those various places (or, just as importantly, aged into the electorate or died out of it). It occurred to me that I could use the exact same method, looking at the net change in, say, white residents versus non-white residents, or college-educated residents versus non-college-educated residents, over the same two-decade period. Most likely, it would show that the places that had tremendous growth in non-white residents or college-educated residents would be the same places that showed tremendous growth in Democratic votes. Did it? Follow over the fold to find out ...
The short answer is, yes, of course it did—although much more noticeably so with race than it did with education. The first map that we'll look at, right below, looks at these changes in racial composition. The counties that show up in blue are the ones where the gain in non-white residents between the 1990 and 2010 censuses outstripped the gain in white residents, while the counties that show up in red are the ones where the gain in white residents in that 20-year period outstripped the gain in non-white residents.
