The Oregon senate! Education! Massachusetts! This one has it all!

After coming to the (probably foregone) conclusion that the votes for two candidates for the same party will closely correlate with each other, even if the actual numbers are very different, I decided to test it out:
This shows the result of the 2008 Oregon senate rate. Obama got a 17 point margin, Jeff Merkely got a 2 point margin and a plurality. Despite the differences, the numbers they scored lined up very well. This is some of the best correlated data I have ever seen. There are no significant outliers. There are not even any insignificant outliers.
(BTW, I will probably now be fishing around for a pair of elections that DOESN'T correlate like this)
Long, long ago, I posted a plot of Obama's margin versus college graduation rates in Oregon's counties. I did the same thing for Merkley's margins versus college graduation rates, and got this:

This chart looks very much like the Obama one, and shows that over all, education is pretty strongly correlated with Merkley's margin. (Which only makes sense, since Obama and Merkley's margins correlate perfectly, and Obama and education correlate, therefore Merkley and education correlate. There is probably a formula for it)
Now, back to Massachusetts. Nationally, college graduation rates correlated with Obama's margin. In several of the states I looked at, college graduation rates correlated with margin, by county. So if you would have asked me, I would have guessed, quite strongly, that Massachusetts' most educated counties were the most Democratic. But guess what I found:

In Oregon, in Colorado, or even in Montana and WYOMING, the counties with the highest education are the most Democratic. In Massachusetts...nope! This is for Coakley's election, but as discussed, since Coakley and Obama's margins correlated very closely, Obama had pretty much this shape.
Now I have some MATHEMATICAL PROOF of something I figured out when I first went to school in Vermont: in the Northwest, education is used to stuff people full of LIBERAL PROPAGANDA so that they agitate for GREEN CITIES and JUSTICE FOR ALL. In Massachusetts, education is something you do to get some cocktail party talk, before you marry an investment banker and move to the suburbs.
(And for those who like this blog only for the MATHS, please forget that previous paragraph).

Its late, but I just have to show that I was right: Coakley vs. Brown

Not too much comment, because my neck kind of hurts right now, having been staring at a glowing box all day, but:
With a few minor exceptions, the counties all line up pretty directly, meaning that there is no major breach or rearrangement between 2008 and now. Not to say that the 30 point shift between Obama's margin and Coakley's margin isn't significant, but Brown didn't get there by targeting some special region or demographic.
When I was looking at the graph before, I thought Middlesex would be the cut-off point, just because of its name. It seems Middlesex was not EXACTLY in the middle (although if it would have followed the 30 point drop exactly, it would have been), but it was pretty close. I didn't really know how Massachusetts population broke down, but apparently the most liberal counties are not actually that populous.

Where I actually make a prediction:

So, one of the biggest political issues as of late is the Massachusetts special election, which has taken an unexpected turn, in that Massachusetts seems to actually have a chance of electing a Republican senator.
Trying to do a qualitative analysis of what is going on in Massachusetts would probably take us into some pretty murky territory, but luckily we can look at numbers.
I charted Obama's margin in 2008 versus Kennedy's margin in 2006, and came up with this:What this shows us is that the Democratic margins in two different races (and for that matter, I could have used any two races) correlate very strongly. Kennedy and Obama both got big margins, with Kennedy getting uniformly bigger margins, although the spread was different in different counties.
So the prediction I am going to make is that whatever the result of Tuesday's election, the plot will look a lot like this (and I will have one ready pretty soon after the election to see if I am telling the truth). Whatever the numbers turn out to be, they will correlate pretty well with either of the two numbers used here.
If there is some skewing of this diagram, it will probably be that the upper left 5 counties, which includes the city of Boston, will probably stay more stubbornly liberal than the counties between Plymouth and Nantucket.
I guess only time will tell!

You will die someday:

You will die someday.

But it probably won't be bears.

I had a chart to show this, but it won't upload. LATER.

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?