Via the Daily Kos Elections blog, here are the results of Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Interesting stuff. Click for a larger image. And see also fenway49’s thoughtful post on the same subject.
Via Daily Kos elections/jeffmd
Here’s Daily Kos’s narrative on how things went down, via their excellent daily email digest (which you should subscribe to if you haven’t already):
Markey performed very well within his own 5th Congressional District, and other demographically similar towns in Boston’s western suburbs just outside it to both the north and south. Markey also did very well in Western Mass., the affluent North Shore towns, Cape Cod, and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Markey’s margins in some of these towns are truly eye-popping: His raw-vote lead stands at about 80,000; Cambridge accounts for 10,000 of that, and Newton and Brookline another 8,000 and 6,000, respectively.
In contrast, Lynch did very well in towns south of the city of Boston, which also largely overlap with his home district, the 8th. Markey, though, did pick off two affluent towns, Hingham and Cohasset, located in MA-08. He also narrowly carried the city of Boston: The sections of the city within MA-08 almost definitely went for Lynch but were narrowly offset by the more minority-heavy and professional areas. Other pockets of Lynch’s strength included the towns south and west of Worcester, as well as in the Merrimack Valley along the New Hampshire border.
Our findings show something of a relationship between income and Markey’s performance. Some of the more industrial cities (that are also Democratic strongholds) like Lowell and Fall River went for Lynch, and Markey only narrowly edged out a win in Worcester. There’s also fairly strong correlation here (between 0.65 and 0.70) with both the 2008 Democratic primary for president, but also, interestingly enough, the 2010 special general election between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown. Indeed, if you were to build a regression model of Markey’s performance, the 2010 special was, remarkably, a better predictor than the 2008 presidential primary.
I’ve seen a bunch of images like these in other contexts for years and every time I wonder why the color scheme is done in such a confusing way. Deep blue verging on black for one extreme and deep red also verging on black for the other extreme — the result is that the two extremes end up looking very similar. In contrast, I have little difficulty distinguishing a pink town from a pale blue town. Why do the heavy Markey/Lynch towns have to be so intense in their colors that it’s tough to tell them apart? Why not a good standard red and blue for the one-sided towns and then make the towns that had closer races move toward white?
and, for that matter, why blue and red for a primary? Given the modern standard of blue for Dem and red for GOP, a primary race should use neither. There are plenty of other color schemes that could be used.
Also, they always show percentages. I want to see actual deltas. I want Cambridge’s +10k to be prevalent, and communities where the spread was +52 to be invisible because, frankly, the +52 wasn’t critical to the results quite like the +10k was.
People vote. Towns don’t, and land area certainly doesn’t.
…because the race was between a closet R and a real D?:)
Apparently that zinger didn’t play will with any actual fishermen, because Markey did significantly better in places where fishing is still a big industry than in similarly working class inland towns. Not surprising, if you think about it; a fisherman’s livelihood depends on ample fish stocks.
Without the fish, there are no fishermen.
was look at Gloucester and Provincetown.
about the 2010 special election being more predictive than the 2008 presidential primaries. 1) I don’t think there was a very stark policy difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in terms of core Democratic values. 2) I suspect a presidential electorate, even in a primary, is somewhat different from a special election electorate.