Back to my old tricks: the 2008 election, poverty, and further comments on the coalition nature of American politics

After my last post, one of my occasional posts on something not state related, I decided to go back to my old tricks: the American states, demographics, and the 2008 election.
The election if fascinating for me because it allows an operationalization of attitudes that it is hard to capture with other statistics. Vermont and Idaho are very different, but what exactly the difference is, is hard to describe until you have an election, and then you have a gigantic difference between the two, that can be plotted. Or, for that matter, Montana and Idaho are very different, but it is hard to say so until you have an election. I mean, besides its obvious that Montana is better than Idaho.
The two variables I looked at today, poverty rate and Obama's margin, show again something that I have been harping on: the different states and areas of the United States have different demographics. This was especially obscured during the evil era of 2004-2005, and "red state/blue state". Despite some similarities in electoral patterns, there is not a lot else that Wyoming and West Virginia have in common. To wit:
What is interesting about this diagram (and I thought it was so interesting that I put it a larger size, and labeled every single state, because there is a lot going on here), is that there is some pretty clear geographic grouping. Especially over on the left side of the diagram, we have two different groups of states that supported McCain: a low-poverty group, consisting of mountain and prairie states, and a high-poverty
group that consisted of southern and Appalachian states. Also, notice that almost all the mountain and prairie states are relatively McCain-supporting, (which depends on whether Nevada and New Mexico are considered mountain states) and relatively low in poverty. Likewise, all southern/Appalachian states are high in poverty, and all support McCain. There is also no middle ground: there are (almost) no states with a poverty rate close to the US average that were strongly McCain-supporting. (The exception to this is possibly Idaho).
Another interesting thing about this diagram is none of the states that were close states (defined currently as within a 5 point margin either way) had a very high or very low poverty rate. What is even more interesting about these states is that they otherwise don't have much in common: Montana, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Missouri and Indiana don't have much in common, besides all being close to the US median poverty rate, and being right on the fence in the election. Arizona was also probably in this group, but broke a little bit more for McCain than its "true" politics would suggest, because it was his homestate. I think these eight states will continue to be 'in the middle'.
There is also a gap between the Florida/Ohio line and states down and to the right. My intuition is that states like Virginia and Colorado, which are to the right of that gap, are where the true Democratic electoral base begins. Although Virginia and Colorado were seen as "swing" states this election, I believe they were actually states that shifted into the base. They have high levels of education, and low levels of poverty, and I think that they are closer to the base than Florida and Ohio are.
Another point to make, especially in regards to me grouping together the prairie/mountain states, is the difference between those states and, say, Colorado, Oregon and Washington might be less than you would expect either from stereotypes or from this chart. From what I have looked at before, the patterns in, say, Wyoming and Oregon are the same. Counties with large amounts of college educated people still go Democratic, sometimes dramatically so. The difference is, Oregon has a lot of those counties, and Wyoming has two of them, and those two counties have fewer people. The pattern in mountain/prairie states is to have the major Democratic-leaning group to be college educated and urban people. In the Appalachian/South, the major Democratic-leaning group seems to be African-Americans. The two sides of the Republican-coalition are also moving in opposite directions: South/Appalachia is becoming more conservative (although partially this is just a result of not having a Clinton and a Gore on the ticket), which the mountain/prairie seems to be becoming more liberal.
My own feeling is, if 2008 is the underlying picture, the Democrats have a really strong position. Greater education and urbanization seem to be moving some areas permanently into their column, such as Colorado and Virginia. It could be that Obama's success in 2008 was a reaction against Bush, and 2004 is closer to the underlying electoral picture. My own belief is that for some of the states, 2008 was the real picture, and for others it was a reaction. And this diagram actually, to me, gives a pretty good idea of which states are which. Ohio and Florida were reaction, Colorado and Virginia were demographic shift.
Of course, there are many other things that can come up. Will Hispanics remain a Democratic group? Will young and college educated people remain Democratic? Will the low-poverty, high education mountain/prairie states continue to become (at least slightly) more Democratic, and the high-poverty, low education Southern/Appalachian states become more Republican? Will incumbency be an advantage, or a disadvantage?
We don't know the future. We can only plot the past.

Mostly because I like poking holes in this one: education around the world

Some years ago, I took a graph of educational attainment amongst the G-8, blanked out the names, and posted it on an internet community, and had people guess which countries they represented. For the most part, people guessed that the United States was the country with the lowest education, while a number of Western European nations had the highest education.
It was actually America with the most education, or at least up there.
Conservatives and liberals like to create a dichotomy between the United States and Western Europe that does not actually exist quite so much, as far as I can operationalize. Liberals believe that Western Europe is an enlightened land of socialism and the United States is a country of knuckle-dragging idiots, while Conservatives believe the United States is the last bastion of capitalism against the socialist realms of Europe. The truth is, the US and Western Europe (with "Western Europe" including Australia, Japan and Canada, of course) are market-driven countries with large social welfare programs.
Someday, I will give you some operational proof of that last statement.
Anyway, education wise, I guess American tourists go to Paris and meet lots of educated people, and assume everyone in France is educated.
That is not even what today's graph is about: today's graph is just about years of education versus college attainment. These are, (as you know by now) related, but not as related as you might guess. As we showed with the United States, its possible for an area to have a high amount of high school graduates, but a low or medium amount of college graduates.So, as could be believed, they are related, but not extremely strongly.
Also, I took this data from nationmaster.com Notice that not all the dots on there are named. The dot next to Norway is New Zealand, but it could be Madagascar or Costa Rica for all you know. This is why I like using the states of the US: they are easy to define. No trouble to decide what nations are comparable.

The two states with the biggest political differences:

A while ago, I wrote that the electoral behavior of Oregon and Washington is fairly similar, which is not exactly a gigantic surprise.

I decided to look for the two states that have the least electoral similarity, and I probably have found them:

Vermont and South Carolina. Throughout much of its history, Vermont was a very Republican state, and South Carolina was a very Democratic state. (This may come as a surprise to some of you.) Since 1992, this has of course reversed. But in their history, Vermont and South Carolina have usually had gigantic differences in electoral margins.
In fact (and this is probably the only states this can be said of), Vermont and South Carolina have never voted for a Democratic candidate in the same election).
Notice that these numbers are margins, not total votes. Notice that South Carolina is up around the 98 mark as a margin. During the years of the "solid south", South Carolina had elections with numbers like 99%-1%. Vermonts Republican margins were usually pretty big, but not quite THAT big.
So, when do you think Vermont and South Carolina will finally agree?

Perot in 1992 and the coalition nature of American politics

I am sitting here wondering what is wrong with me, and why people don't like me.
But there is no answer to a question like that, so I will ignore it.

Instead, I will talk about what is on your mind: Ross Perot, and where exactly his support came from. As discussed in the last post, the evidence that Perot gained votes predominantly from one party or the other is, from the evidence I have, not apparent.

One thing about the diagram yesterday is it looked suspiciously like a much earlier plot I had done: Obama's margin versus high school graduation rates. States that went for McCain tended to have either low or high graduation rates.

(I hope you are following my intuition, because I am actually not, so connect the dots for me. After all, connecting dots is what this blog is all about).

I decided to plot Perot's total vote (not his margin, obviously) against high school graduation rates. (Using data from the 1990 census)

If any of you have been paying attention to my futile quest to link together demographic data with election margins, this data should really stick out, because...there is actually a pretty strong correlation here. I actually ran Perot vs. college, and then the same diagrams for Bush and Clinton, and none of them were very conclusive. But this diagram shows that states with high High School graduation rates had a pretty meaningful tilt towards Ross Perot. In fact, there is something about the way I made this diagram that conceals this: the cluster of states just inside the upper right hand corner is mostly New England states, which have two things in common with prairie/mountain states: lots of high school graduates, and a liking for Ross Perot. Notice that there is not much else they have in common though: Massachusetts and Idaho are stereotypically the polar opposites of national politics.
Notice down in the lower left, low High School and low Perot support states. Now, if you can remember back 18 years, the Southern states were divided between Bush and Clinton. Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia were Clinton states. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina were Bush states. But all of them have low High School rates, and low Perot rates.

One of the ways that I look at the American "two party system" is as a "two coalition system". The coalitions are made of many different regional groups, with both official power structures and differing demographies. Perot carved up a big part of that coalition for himself in some parts, but not so in others.

This is still relevant, because the current coalition that makes up the Republican Party has two major geographic bases of support: the Prairie/Mountain states and the South/Appalachia. But these two groups have very different demographies, and different cultures and politics.

Perot "taking" votes in 1992

There are only two possible ways for a Democratic candidate to win an election: ACORN, or a third party "steals" them from the Republican Party.
Dog food isn't very tasty, neither is it nutritious.
Anyway, one of the pieces of CW thrown around about the 1992 election is that Clinton won because Perot peeled off votes from Bush. This is also disputed, but since the ballots, with their '2nd choice' bubbles, are all sequestered in a vault under Mt. Rushmore for 99 years, we won't know for a while who people would have voted for if Mr. Perot was not in a race.
But, we do have a technology that can hint at it. And that technology is...scatterplotting! Of course!
First, let me apologize that the new version of openoffice done gone and thrown my Y-Axis labeling right in the middle where it confuses things. I updated to karmic koala because I was trying to get Mario Kart's sound to work right, and it just kind of happened...
Anyway, back in 1992, George Stephapolous has to rent a motel room to call Clinton and tell him when a bimbo is erupting, because they don't have cell phones, and they have no idea what KARMIC KOALA is. But they do know who Ross Perot is.
The above diagram has basically no correlation between how much of a margin Clinton had, and what total percent Perot got. If Perot was mostly taking votes from conservatives, he would be getting a lot more votes in Nebraska, where there are plenty of conservatives, than in Massachusetts, where they are not quite as many. And yet Perot got 23% of the vote in both, even though Nebraska was 18 points against Clinton and Massachusetts was 18 points for him. Of course, looking at the plot a bit closer shows that there may be a little bit of a lean towards Perot in more conservative states: so maybe there was a few states where it made a difference. Over all, though, there doesn't seem to be much evidence either way from this data.

As promised: Canada oh Canada

One good thing about Canada is, there is only 13 demographic units to enter data for.
Of course, I am still looking for good sources of data, and for good sources of interesting data. Those lacking, I just looked at what wikipedia could tell me, and decided to look to see if gdp per capita and land area were correlated:
There does seem to be some sort of trend here, or more than one. Also, the two big outliers are both very small territories. So I don't know. Also, yesterday I promised that we would get a plot that looked like a dragon's head. And of course this doesn't look like a dragon's head, but it does look somewhat like a pair of pliers. Or, as they say in Canada: "spanners".

I keep on telling myself I will diversify, and then don't: ERS data on

I really do want to do more international stuff, but I tend to look at the US data, because I know where to start, and I know where the good data can be found. But some day, I will try to figure out how the Canadian census data works, and you will be able to compare Alberta to Nova Scotia all you want.

Another thing is, when I started this, I wanted to look for interesting shapes. But, truth be told, most data looks about the same: a big smudgy diagonal line. Such as this:
Rural and urban poverty go up together, and rural poverty is almost always higher: although by differing margins. While there seems to be the expected grouping in poverty along regional lines, the ratios themselves seem to be caused by different factors. Massachusettes, Nevada and Indiana all have higher urban poverty than rural poverty, but for very different reasons.

I will still be out there looking for an interesting shape. Life span versus miles of highway amongst Canadian provinces looks like a DRAGON HEAD! Maybe!