Agriculture, agriculture, agriculture:

So, as with most of my digging into dry, obscure facts, the inspiration for this came from reading something that made me so annoyed that I was gritting my teeth. Said thing was an article written by a representative of a Montana trade group talking about how "backyard chickens" and "organic farms" couldn't really feed America.
Which, in part, I am sure he is right: all this hippy agriculture could indeed just be a fantasy, and a fantasy that seems to have some disconcerting implications, mostly involving dinosaur-riding.But, as long as we are talking about agricultural fantasies, it is also fair to talk about large chunks of rural America playing cowboy. I knew that California was the country's largest agricultural state, and I guessed that much agriculture actually went on in big, mainly urbanized states, rather than in the mythical "heartland". But!
The thing to do is to actually look at data.There seems to be a loose relationship between population and agricultural output, although a lot of that has to do with California and Texas.
But that chart is just a warm up, since of course population doesn't have a lot to do with agricultural output: most agricultural output goes on far away from cities.
So the next chart shows us the percentage of a state's population that is rural versus its per capita agricultural output.
Suddenly, the Dakotas become way more important: per capita, they are generating over 12,000 dollars of agricultural income. Other likely suspects, such as Nebraska and Iowa, are also performing quite well. However, up in the top left, notice a four-pointed triangle of states that otherwise don't have a lot in common: Wyoming, Montana, Vermont and Mississippi. Both are highly rural, but have a rather modest agricultural output per capita. California is quite lonely down in the corner.
But!
Of course it doesn't make much sense to look at states in terms of overall per-capita. All those stylists in Hollywood aren't adding much to California's agricultural output. So what if we just look at output per RURAL capita?


Even though everyone moves up with this, the effect is relatively different. California, with a very small rural population, manages to create 48,000 dollars of agricultural income per rural resident. Massachusetts has a similar effect, but that is largely an artifact. As would be Rhode Island and New Jersey, who have infinite output for every rural resident.
This also puts the Midwest/Great Plains in a slightly more modest perspective, and shows that our four-pointed triangle is quite disappointing. Considering how much of Montana is rural, rural Montana (or Wyoming) is not actually producing that much agriculture.

So if organic farms are an illusion, agribusiness being an actual economic force in Montana is doubly so.

Of course, a lot of these charts are dealing with things that are very hard to operationalize. Many "rural" areas are not actually given to serious agriculture, and much agriculture goes on in urban areas (such as Fresno county, which is a metropolitan area, Class 2, and has by its self as much money from agriculture as all of Montana). And of course the amounts of arable land, and how much it can be used, vary greatly from state to state. (It is amazing that North Dakota could even have 1/10th of the agricultural output of California, since it snows in North Dakota from September to May). There are lots of different ways to operationalize this, but my first suspicion was correct: heavy duty agriculture goes on mostly in a number of states, some of which are quite populous and urban.

I have way too much time on my hands: every county in five states, Obama, and education

There are two things wrong with this blog: first, I haven't updated every day, like I used to. Second, I seem to be get more and more wrapped up in political minutiae, despite my occasional efforts to the contrary.

Well, sorry.

So I have followed even further down my obsessive path by plotting the college graduation rates of every single county in five states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, against Obama's results there. I did this because I had already done three of those states, and noticed a recurring pattern. So I wondered what would happen if all 197 of those counties were plotted against each other.

And the results were:

What this diagram shows to me is that in these five states, the politics are not quite as different as could be imagined. Living in a county with lots of college educated people will probably make you more liberal in Idaho, just as it will in Washington. The only difference is that Washington state has a lot more of those counties. Also, notice the three quadrants: there is only one county, Ada, Idaho, with over 30% of college graduates that went Republican. There are, however, lots of Obama counties that are under 30%.
For those not familiar with the multisplendored thing that is the geography of the Northwest, those outliers in the lower right all have interesting stories:
Big Horn, Montana: is on the Crow Indian reservation
Glacier, Montana: is on the Blackfoot Indian reservation
Deer Lodge, Montana: has been working class leftist for a 100 years ago. Full of the descendants of Irish miners. Along with the people in Silver Bow county, they invented the weekend and these counties have not voted Republican EVER.
Blaine, Montana: another reservation county
Lincoln, Clatsop and Columbia, Oregon: coastal counties. I don't know why the Oregon Coast, and the Washington Coast, tend so Democratic
Cowlitz, Pacific and Gray's Harbor, Washington: Another trio of working class, rural, coastal counties. Gray's Harbor is where Kurt Cobain came from.
Hood River, Oregon and Multnomah, Oregon: the power of HIPPIES. Multnomah is an interesting contrast with King: despite having less education, and less minorities, Obama did better than he did in King County, Washington.

Outliers on the other side of the map:
Okay, I lied about one thing. Idaho probably is more conservative than Oregon, Washington or (most of) Montana, even with its generally lower college rates. Consider Madison county, which has close to a 25% college graduation rate, but which Obama lost by a margin of 70%. This are is, as could be guessed, heavily populated by the Mormon ethnicity. In fact, I suspect that most of the counties that skew to the left on this diagram are probably heavily ethnically Mormon.

So now we know!

Oregon Measures 66, 67, and the Obama Proxy

During a special election yesterday, the state of Oregon passed two ballot measures, one increasing taxes on people in the upper income bracket, and the other increasing corporate taxes. The measures passed by a narrow margin, and were only passed because of a large margin in Multnomah County, Oregon's largest and most liberal county.

The measures had very similar margins on the state level, 54.2 percent for Measure 66, increasing personal income taxes, and 53.5 percent for Measure 67, raising corporate taxes. Broken down by county, there was also, as could be expected, an almost perfect correlation.In fact, because of the way I round, there might have been even more correlation than this chart suggests. In any case, that isn't very interesting, as the results could probably be expected.
What is slightly more interesting is when I run the numbers for 66 (which, as I said, are also pretty much the numbers for 67) against my best current proxy of Oregon's politics: Obama's 2008 margins.
There is still a high deal of correlation here, alt:hough the numbers are different: Obama did a lot better than either of the margins did. However, some areas over performed Obama's numbers, whereas others underperformed. The counties on the right were underperformers, the counties on the left overperformers. Hood River, Washington, Clackamas and Deschutes counties are all underperformers, and the reason could be that they are counties with a lot of education, that might have been drawn to the image of "Professor Obama", but because they are also fairly wealthy, are less then enthusiastic about tax increases. On the other hand, Lincoln and Clatsop counties on the coast, as well as Umatilla, Wallowa and Harney in Eastern Oregon, are all more rural, traditional areas that might not like the image of liberalism, but might be more prone to economic populism.
At least, that is one way to look at the data. And of course, the skewing doesn't change the absolute numbers: rich, suburban Washington County still supported the measure, and poor, rural Umatilla County did now.

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.