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]

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