Education and the election by region: Coastal South

Our next region is the Coastal South, which compromises Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Once again, this is a somewhat artificial region, since I believe South Carolina and Georgia might have more in common with Alabama and Mississippi than they do with the metropolitan states of the coast. However, that is a running caveat, and since this entire thing has gone on for quite a while, lets look at what we have:
This area does have some high education counties, and actually quite a few of them, but they seem to be mostly located in Virginia (NoVA, to be precise), with a few in North Carolina. The high education suburbs that voted strongly for McCain are mostly in Georgia. Although Florida is included here, none of its counties are strong outliers, which may be significant. There is also not quite as many heavily minority, low-education counties as there were in the interior South.

Education and the election by region: Interior South

Due to a string of computer problems, I haven't been able to update people fully on the wonders of demographics and politics. But now I am able to do so, and I am going to move to the next region, the Interior South. I originally just did "The South", but that was too large of a region, so I decided to break it down into the Interior South and the Coastal South. The Interior South consists of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. As always, this is a somewhat artificial group of states, but I think it makes sense in some ways.That being said, lets see what we have:
There are probably three major stereotypes that apply here: that compared to other regions, the Interior South is less educated, more conservative, and the vote is split more along racial lines than in any other region. And this plot shows that that is indeed the case.
There are only 11 counties with over 30% college graduates, and those counties voted for McCain over Obama 7-5. The most educated county in this region voted for McCain, and that seems to also be unique. Also, while the less-educated counties the Great Plains and western regions hovered around the 15% mark, here they seem to be clumped around the 10% mark.
Even the counties that did vote for Obama that have higher education rates seem to be the most African-American, and so the education here is mostly an artifact.
So:
In the interior south, race and not education is probably the defining mark of the electorate.

Education and the election by region: Texas

After having done the great plains, I reach my 4th region: Texas.
Yes, Texas gets to be a region all by itself. Popular belief (especially amongst Texans) would have it that Texas is unique amongst the states, and it is not an unfounded belief. Because Texas has some very urban areas, some very rural areas, some very Hispanic areas, and has aspects of being both a Southern, a Great Plains, and a Western state, as well as the fact that it has lots and lots of counties, I decided to put it in a category of its own.
Texas has some of the patterns we know and (love), but has some patterns of its own. We have a lot of counties in the lower right that are strongly minority (most of which are Hispanic, but I think some African-American counties along the TX/LA border might be there too). We have a lot of rural, white, conservative counties in the lower left. We have some conservative suburban counties in the upper left. And we have our single "college town" county, Travis (home of Austin and the University of Texas) in the upper right.
One thing that is interesting is that while the conservative suburban counties in the upper left are slightly less conservative than the conservative rural counties in the lower left, they are still, compared to many other areas of the country, pretty conservative. In California, Orange County slipped through with a 2 point margin for McCain. Here, we have many counties over the 30 mark with big margins.
Second thing to notice: notice how close Dallas (Dallas), Bexar (San Antonio) and Harris (Houston) are to each other. These aren't the best educated counties in Texas, but they are three of the biggest. So it looks like the big urban areas are moving to the Democratic column, but I suspect that has to do with minority population: their better educated suburbs are still more conservative than them. Tarrant and Hays, which are both suburban counties, with good college rates, seem to be following the liberal pattern, though.
Also, notice in the bottom, there is a big hole in the middle. Low education counties in Texas are strongly conservative (if they are White) or strongly liberal (if they are Hispanic), but none of them seem to be contested.
I think the bottom line in Texas is that while the Black and Hispanic vote make it somewhat competitive, a state where the well-educated suburbs are still strongly conservative is fated to be conservative for a while longer.

Education and the elections by region: The Great Plains

Since I have already done the mountain/Pacific Northwest states previously, I am skipping to the next region: the Great Plains. The Great Plains, which constitutes North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, is the smallest region in terms of population that I will be looking at. But I feel that it is indeed a unique region, because unlike the Western States, which tend to have geographically larger counties, the counties in this area tend to be smaller, and have no barriers between them. Thus, there are much fewer places where counties have distinctive demographies. This is also the case in the Midwest, but unlike in the Midwest, the Great Plains has fewer enclaves that are either ethnically diverse or home to manufacturing. Thus, it makes sense to treat the Great Plains as a region.
The Great Plains region is also, electorally speaking, not very diverse or interesting.
As with other regions, the lower right corner is composed of ethnic communities, which in this region are all Native American. Otherwise, there is a big clump of counties between -80 and 0, and between 10 and 20, and then a smattering of counties running upwards, and ever so slightly to the right, above the 20 mark. However, there is on the face of it very little tie between college education and voting patterns. However, this is another place where the population difference of counties makes a big difference. Douglas County, Nebraska, has 1/4th of the population of Nebraska, making it just as important for Nebraska as Los Angeles County is for California. Douglas County, Nebraska also contains an entire congressional district, and under Nebraska's almost-unique system of giving electoral votes, was Obama's sole electoral vote in this region.

From the information here, I can't see if there is a trend, and how much of a trend there is, between education and voting patterns in the Great Plains.

Education and the elections by region: the Hispanic Southwest.

Now I set about the continuation of my task to separate the relationship between education and elections down into regions.
One of the first things to be mentioned about this is that separating the United States into regions is never a cut and dried task. Parts of California obviously have much more in common with parts of Oregon than they do with the Arizona/Mexico border, and yet I will be grouping all of California and Arizona together. I think that most of the groupings I made make sense, but I might have to look at the results closely before I decide. I am grouping states together based not just on demographics, but also on the number of counties that state has, which can skew results wildly. Texas and California have similar demographics, but it doesn't show up in a scatterplot because the 200 small, rural, white counties that Texas has make it look like they are quite different.

So I put together California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, and this is what I got:

The first thing to notice is that in opposition to the national map, this area has only two counties over the 30% mark that voted for McCain, and both of those were only barely over the 30% mark, and only narrowly voted for McCain. This might be significant, or it might be caused by the area's larger counties. In an another state, where Orange County would be two or three counties, one of them might be much more wealthy, educated and Republican. But because of California's large counties, Orange County combines many different demographics.
At least, that is one theory.
Other than that, We have kind of the expected points: highly educated urban areas in the upper right, minority communities (mostly Hispanic) in the lower right, and rural, white counties in the lower left.
As I have pointed out before, counties make a bad unit sometimes. I specifically marked San Diego and Los Angeles Counties, because while they are not outliers, it is important to remember that most of the population in these data points is in only a few of the data points.

Incidentally: the ACS versus census census data

After doing my gigantic plot, I found out that there was actually newer census data than the 2000 census data I was using.

That data comes from the American Community Survey (ACS), which is done pretty much continuously, and generates new estimates of key demographics also pretty much continuously. Some of these 2008 numbers are different than the 2000 numbers!

However, having made this mistake, I will justify on it on several grounds: first, the census data, while older, is more complete. The census really does try to count every single person in the country --- while the ACS just estimates it. Also, the ACS doesn't seem to try to take a picture of every single county, which is one of the purposes of my plots.

Although, I am certainly waiting for the 2010 census data to come out.

The same, but different: How McCain did

So we looked at the total situation, we looked at the Obama states, and now it is time to look at the McCain states.


Once again, we have an almost random-looking assortment of dots, that when properly examined, show the breadth and depth of American politics and demographics. And, as I've said on the last two posts, a few things can be deceptive about this diagram. For one thing, the big dense ball below the 20% mark on the left: mostly rural counties across the south and east. Again, some of this may be clearer when I break down by regions.

Other than that:

In states that McCain won, McCain did pretty good in most counties, as well. Which is a fairly intuitive result. However, above the 30% mark, the counties started to even out, and above 40%, Obama won more counties than McCain.

What is especially interesting to me is the counties above the 35% mark. On the left, they seem to mostly occur in the south: Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. The two Kansas cases are somewhat nominal, since they occur pretty close to the line. On the right side, we have a few Southern middle class African-American counties (DeKalb, Fulton in Georgia), a few college counties (Clay in South Dakota, Boone in Missouri, Gallatin in Montana) and a few resort communities (Blaine in Idaho, also Gallatin in Montana). Oh, and also Travis County Texas, of course.

So, what this tells us is that while the demographics of the middle-class and upper-class south are still probably pretty Republican, those same groups of the mountain west and great plains may be becoming more liberal. Is the rest of the northwest following Oregon and Washington solidly into the Democratic camp? Will the south stay the south?

And to those questions, I don't have an answer.