Somebody had to do it. The MAP MADNESS must be COAGULATED.

How about a purple county cartogram?

{from friendsfriends}

I found some good congressional district cartograms at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/Cartogram_Central/goal.html , if someone with the expertise want to colour them in. :)

Mmm. map. Love that last one. :)

There's a pretty strong correlation between Democratic counties and counties that contain at least one large metropolitan area. That's the significance of the county boundaries.

My co-worker put it this way: "Any time you have a lot of people crammed into a small space, they end up in the party that makes you get along with each other."

I didn't actually notice that the USA Today map didn't include Chicago results. Hmm.

This could be a chicken-or-egg problem, but isn't it true that cities tend to draw liberal types? Most have several large universities, which disproportionately attract and graduate liberals, and many people end uop sticking around the cities where they went to college. (I know I did.) Also, traditionally liberal groups, like Jews, African-Americans, and queer folk are concentrated in cities. It could be argued that the queers came for the tolerance, but it's clearer that the others ended up there for historical socioeconomic reasons.

See, I've never bought the contention that exposure necessarily breeds tolerance. In fact, I can think of many counterexamples. For instance, I knew someone in high school whose father grew up in a community where there were many Hispanics. As a result, he was very prejudiced against them, but had no particular prejudices against Blacks. In the small segregrated town I lived in, however, I ran into a lot of anti-Black prejudice among my schoolmates. But when Hispanics moved into the community for the first time, they were met with something like fascination (being from LA and up on all the trends).

Another thing: Given the history of Chicago--solidly Democratic since its origins--I don't see that "Democrat" correlates very well with "liberal" or "tolerant". That's why I'm more inclined to assume that urban environments attract more liberals rather then that living in a city makes you less conservative.

On the last point - my take on that is slightly different. Now, I'm a biochemist not a social philosopher so I'm probably being very simplistic about this, and lots of people we know could probably tear my arguments apart. But oh well.

People tend to define "us" as the group surrounding them. In the bible belt, your "us" is a small community, often built around churches as a community organization, and large extended families. If anyone in their community needs help, they take care of them... and if someone needs help, people know it. It's a great system as far as it goes.

When you live in a big city, your "us" group has to encompass more people than you can personally know. And there are a lot more cracks to fall through... the personal support net has a looser weave. And not everyone belongs to the same church, and in fact not everyone even belongs to a church. And the population is more mobile, so the extended family unit is missing too. So people in big cities are used to passing the charity duty off to the government, because otherwise there is no one there to help.

People in small towns say "hey, we take care of our own, why should those city folk get the benefit of our tax dollars to take care of theirs? Stupid lazy godless welfare-state people."

People in big cities say "but you're getting _our_ tax dollars for your highways, farm subsidies, phone/water/electricity hookups, etc, at a much greater dollar-distributed-for-dollar-taken rate. What are you whining about?" (note: went to go check my facts before posting this... found this. Note bottom 14 return-on-tax-dollar states: they're pretty much all blue. We're the ones getting taxed more and served less, and we're _still_ for larger government.)

And then we're stalemated.

And yes, I do see the value of not-big-city lifestyle... after all, I'm the insane one who is trying to go _back_ to the midwest, albeit in a college-town environment, which is more blue than most of it.

I think I'd argue (based on no real evidence) that suburbs and small towns are very much the same structure -- less diverse, more cohesive, based on some notion of us-ness. And I'm quite sure that Willamette wants to keep its taxes at home for its own schools, and ignore the Chicago public schools as much as possible.

I'd always thought of suburbs as being rather like Iowa, actually. At least the "citified" part of Iowa where I grew up (where city is defined as 80,000 person town).

- Emphasis on quality education overwhelming almost everything else, because the main point of moving to the suburbs is family life
- Not quite having the culture of the big cities, not quite having the community of a small town, but trying hard for both
- Being slightly afraid that "city problems" - drugs, gangs - will invade and make your idyllic community much less so
- Strip-mall economy ;)

Iowa has been split right down the middle in voting for the past few elections. I don't know how the suburbs usually fare, but I'd always assumed they were the "soccer moms and nascar dads" that make up the middle both sides were chasing.

Again, I am not a sociologist - I don't necessarily have the facts to back any of this up; just my impression based on the variety of places I've lived and the prevalent attitudes there.

I don't think suburban communities are that similar to metropolitan ones. People largely move to the suburbs in order to get away from the closely clustered people without having to leave their jobs in the city. Socially I think it's more closely related to the small rural community model that reesi talked about.

It's a similar story for the Jews: In much of the Old World, they were prohibited from owning land or farming until Emancipation in the 19th century. By that time, of course, they had become entrenched in urban areas and had no interest in a life of the soil. So, when they moved to the USA, they congregrated in larger cities while it was gentile peasants who founded farmsteads and villages.

Later immigrants also tended to congregate in cities. Was it primarily because cities were more tolerant or because, in an industrial society, that's where the jobs for unskilled labourers tend to be? The Great Migration, after all, didn't begin in the wake of the Civil War--most ex-slaves remained sharecroppers for generations--but in the shadow of WWII, when the factories of the Rust Belt needed every pair of hands they could find.

Due to the exploitative conditions, the urban proletariat was also ripe for radicalisation. I can't really see socialists and anarchists prosyletising from town to town in the Midwestern countryside, but I suppose some must've tried during the 20s and 30s. In contrast to the situation in Europe or Latin American, most of the rural dwellers were freeholders who had a stake in the status quo and no interest in revolution or redistribution. The same can't be said about factory workers living in urban slums.

The guy who drew the purple county map has Chicago counted, and he explained where his data came from: USA Today, amusingly enough. Illinois' results are at http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/PresidentialByCounty.aspx?oi=P&rti=G&sp=IL&tf=l.

Maybe USA Today drew their county map before Cook County had completed their count?

Shannon and Todd counties, by comparison to a South Dakota county map, from this page.

And from another map on the same page... yes, the blue spots are all reservations. The ones along the bottom are the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations; the larger splotch at the top are the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations.

The area around Pueblo, Colorado are the blue bloches you're seeing. The city has a decided blue-collar/Labor Dem slant.

Sorry, it looks like that site is temporarily down. See her journal for an alternate URL.

Yes, yes indeed. I only forgot to include the "Jesusland" map that's making the rounds...

That map is really cool. Can you do it for 2004 as well as 2000?

I think your point about IL and CA is very, very sound. I know many people (overwhelemingly living in SF and LA) whou could not understand how Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor. But it was easy to understand why he won and why they were surprised when you looked at the map of results by county.

Thank you! I was trying to figure out exactly the right thing to do with the purple county map -- perhaps express population density as color intensity? -- but I like your solution of using brightness instead.

I agree - that's a great way to visualize the result!

Is this a project you're still working on? Would it be feasible to try to plot similar maps for the 2004 election?

Excellent -- thank you! I like yours better than this map, which conveys the same idea, but I like your use of white for open space better.

I found the website for the project that produced the map: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/. The author says:

Counties shown in black represent either missing election data or a mismatch between the US Census data and the USA Today data. For example, the New England states' election return data is given for each municipality and/or district rather than for each county. Hence, it couldn't be easily matched with the county boundaries.

Fantastic! My hat is off to you, sir.

The difference-change map between 2000 and 2004 is especially cool, and a nice bonus.