The following can be found at Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight Blog.
It is tremendous, both for post-election analysis, but also for the fact, that I did not know until today, that President Obama won Rhodes Island, Vermont and New York by larger margins than Massachusetts. I would have thought(as I believe we were in 2008, unless memory is failing me now), that Mass would have been closer to the top of this list.
Discuss
13 Comments . Leave a comment below.winning by a higher margin, but I doubt we’d move up that much on that list.
Obama got 61.8% of MA in ’08, for a margin of 25.81% over McCain that year. I don’t want to do the math for other states, but I do know that off the top of my head, only 5 or 6 states that went for Obama in both elections actually had a higher percentage of the vote going to Obama this time around. He won most of the states with slightly smaller margins.
Vermont generally votes more Democratic than Mass. in Presidential elections these days, I think. New York and Rhode Island are strongly Dem too. In 2008 it was VT +37.2, RI +27.8, MA +25.8, NY +25.5.
But if just 2% of Massachusetts voters had voted Obama instead of Romney we’d be ahead of NY and RI. Even though Romney isn’t so popular here, it’s plausible that he got 2% of voters who might have been open to Obama to vote for him, just based on name recognition and all the personal contacts he has here.
was +25.2 in 2008. So we were 7th, counting DC, in 2012 and 5th in 2008.
I will never forget that Romney was governor here. I spend more time protesting at the state house during his four years, then all the rest of my life combined. Bah Humbug.
George W. Bush
My, how things change…
A fabulous companion chart, in my opinion, would be a similar ranking of states in order of their net outflow/inflow of federal dollars. I think such a chart might highlight who the real “givers” and “takers” are.
…from Mother Jones on this. Politifact rates a similar chart mostly true, “mostly” because the data is a few years old.
According to a diary by kos on dailykos, Obama was up 50.75 – 47.58, or roughly 3.2%, as of yesterday. Apparently there are still a couple million uncounted votes–most from deep blue NY & CA, and this margin may grow slightly (by .1 or .2%) by the time it is all done.
This is higher than the table’s 2.5%, and means that Virginia is still slightly redder than the country at large.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/20/1163485/-Mitt-Romney-47-percent-watch
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Here are a few other intersting things I notice:
- CA is bluer than the Pacific Northwest. This is a definte shift: I recall 1988, when Dukakis won OR & WA but lost CA.
- Hawaii is not normally so Democratic. A competitive senate race probably brought more people to the polls, and the collapse of Republican support among Asian-Americans had a real effect here.
- I suspect that something opposite to that was in play in Massachusetts: the Warren-Brown race brought more casual Repubican voters to the polls than normal.
- 11 stats went for Obama by a smaller margin than Georgia, Romney’s second-worst state, went for Romney. This shows that we can’t afford to do much worse in the future, and that the Romney states are all likey to be solid R 4 years from now, with the one exception of NC.
Except…
Appalachian regions clearly vote for Obama in smaller numbers than their demographics, politics, etc. suggest. Just as Obama gets a bonus in Hawaii and in states with larger black populations (DC, NY, MD, the Southeast), he clearly takes a penalty in Appalachia. That doesn’t move too many states near the margin, except perhaps Virginia and NC, which have both larger black populations *and* Appalachian populations.
As the Hispanic voting population grows faster than the white voting population, states like
* NC (GOP 2.2)
* GA (GOP 8.0)
* AZ (GOP 11.1)
* TX (GOP 15.8)
will move toward the Democrats. Obviously, Texas is the big prize, but all of these states have substantial electoral votes.
given that we don’t know the candidates yet. But if ever a year was set up for an incumbent to lose, this was it. Actual economics and facts be damned, the GOP was all set to run on “he’s had four years and things still stink.” I know some people who voted Obama in 2008 but Romney this time because of that. I wouldn’t assume Obama’s performance in the “red” states this year is the best Democrats can aspire to.
Especially in 2016, an election with two non-incumbents. 2016 will depend on who’s running and the state of the party brands, which depends on Obama’s second term (see McCain). In any event, though it would be nice to put pressure on “Romney” states, the Democratic nominee will have a 60 EV cushion just trying to hold serve.
n/t
That’s last weeks news you sore winner.
You have to get on with your life. Really dude.
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