The West is the best?

[koganbot]

Interesting stuff from Andy Gelman, saying basically that the whole country tended to shift in the same amount towards the Democratic presidential candidate in comparison to 2004, though of course in a place like Wyoming, for instance, such a shift might pass your attention by, since the state still went heavily for the Republican. (Arkansas and Louisiana were the two major exceptions, they actually shifting to the Republican, while Alaska, Kentucky, Arizona, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts stayed about the same as 2004, all but the last of those being strong Republican states in presidential contests.) But looking more precisely, I see that the states where percentages tended to jump a bit more to Obama were Hawaii (by a lot), Indiana, Utah, Delaware, North Dakota, Nevada, Montana, Nebraska, Vermont, and Idaho. And of those ten, six of them are from what I'm calling the West (the plains and mountains and west of the mountains): Utah, North Dakota, Nevada, Montana, Nebraska, and Idaho. Three of these - Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho - got lost in the analytical shuffle because they were going from overwhelmingly Republican to merely very strongly Republican. But still, the West is shifting more.

(Also, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight thinks the final tally, once all the late returns and early voting and absentee ballots are added up, will show Obama winning by about 6.5%, not 5%.)

Comments

[koganbot]

Oh, and as Gelman says, the opinion polls for the presidential race tended to be accurate, though running a bit behind Obama in the states he did well in, and running a bit ahead of him in the states where he did poorly. Again, pro-Obama Hawaii is the big exception, which was expected to go heavily for Obama but went way more for him than predicted. And Nevada and Vermont were the other two where Obama ran a good deal better than predicted. McCain did a good deal better than predicted in Alaska, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.

[koganbot]

And Virginia and North Dakota weren't as off from where they'd been predicted as I'd thought.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Hey Frank, not sure whether you noticed, but this morning the Times ran a half-page county-by-county breakdown map of party shifts from 2004 that was really interesting; Krugman ran a smaller version on his blog last night:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/zell-miller-was-right-sort-of/

Even some of the coastal parts of Texas shift strongly toward the Dems, and except for most of Arizona and some very small patches in Idaho and Wyoming, the West looks overwhelmingly blue, as does (less suprisingly, given electoral results) most of the rustbelt and New England). Same with pretty much the entire Atlantic coast, from Maine down to Florida, give or take a couple counties in Massachusetts that I presume did even better for Kerry last time. (Alaska is weird, redder as it gets more inland toward Wasilla I assume, but given election irregularities that 538 is reporting on now I'm not sure what to believe with that state.) What I'm curious about, though, is how this shift map would compare to ones in earlier election years when the presidency changes to a new party. It looks overwhelming, but for all I know it's business as usual.

[koganbot]

Don't know anything about the shift in earlier elections. Gelman is arguing that the returns show that the general shift seems to have happened more or less evenly throughout the country, rather than concentrating in one place or the other. What jumps out at me as exceptions are Indiana, which moved big, and northern Utah (Salt Lake City and environs, I'm guessing), and North Dakota and Montana, all increasing their Democratic candidate percentage substantially (though in places like Utah that's still hardly going to make the state vote Dem on the national ticket). And not counting Arizona and Alaska, which had a favorite son and daughter, or Lousiana, which lost a lot of its Democratic population to the flood, it was basically Appalachia and the Ozarks that shifted more Republican. I'm wondering if this has to do with young people moving out and Hispanics not moving in.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

I guess as far as the party shift being uniform, it depends how "general" you want to be on the issue; the data clearly shows several degrees of changedness, as far as I can tell. Though I should really read what Gelman wrote, I suppose.

Here's George Smith, getting interestingly granular on the shifts within Pennsylvania (and echoing what you just wrote about Louisiana):

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2008/11/voter-trends-in-pennsyltucky-dems-drink.html

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

....or, well, probably not quite "business as usual" (Obama won bigger than most winners have recently), but maybe just not as overwhelming as the shift looks to the naked map-eye?

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

More from George (who also comments on Frank's Apps-and-Ozarks theory):

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2008/11/vestigial-reptile-brain-gop-red-matter.html