stomv made an excellent point about election result maps by percent: A geographically large town with a large percent margin of victory looks like it had a lot of impact, even if the population is small. What matters ultimately is number of votes, not number of towns or size of the town.
So here’s my map of victory margins by raw vote total, not percent, per community. If you click on the map it will take you to an interactive version on Google where you can click on a city or town and see the details. Sorry about the map legend showing a maximum of 80K difference — that’s the total margin of victory in the state, not one community, but I don’t want to re-do the whole map to fix that. Color scheme goes from purple (Lynch) to green (Markey) — no reds and blues 🙂
Here are Markey’s top 20 towns in order of margin of victory (in votes). In all of these towns except Boston he beat 65%, sometimes by a lot (e.g. 85% in Newton). Cumulatively, these towns provided Markey with a cushion of 67,765 votes (he won by just under 80,000 votes).
City or town Markey Cumul.
Margin Margin.
Cambridge 9,962 9,962
Newton 8,419 18,381
Brookline 5,935 24,316
Somerville 4,467 28,783
Arlington 4,300 33,083
Lexington 3,931 37,014
Northampton 3,426 40,440
Boston 3,170 43,610
Amherst 2,774 46,384
Medford 2,328 48,712
Framingham 2,295 51,007
Malden 2,133 53,140
Watertown 2,098 55,238
Belmont 2,085 57,323
Needham 1,975 59,298
Springfield 1,903 61,201
Concord 1,867 63,068
Wellesley 1,857 64,925
Natick 1,421 66,346
Waltham 1,419 67,765
Stomv’s point about percentages vs. vote margin is well taken. But I sorted my handy spreadsheet and learned that Ed Markey won 159 towns where there were fewer than 1,000 votes cast on Tuesday. Those towns gave him a combined margin of victory of 22,507 votes. That’s almost as much as his top three towns by margin (Cambridge, Newton, Brookline) combined.
Lynch won 50 towns with fewer than 1,000 votes cast, cumulative margin of 5,043. That means that in all towns with fewer than 1,000 votes cast combined, Markey won by 17,464. About as much as his margin in Cambridge and Newton combined.
Although the individual towns are small, I think there is a value to having a bloc of solid support like Markey received in Western Mass. Taking only those towns in that contiguous Markey patch in the west, and tossing in the three towns won by Lynch in that region (Adams, Warren, Southbridge), Markey won the Western Mass. block by a total of 23,663 votes. Again, nothing to sneeze at.
maps like the initial ones can tend to overemphasize the importance of a small population town going for Markey 65% vs a large population city going for Markey 60%, especially when some of the small population towns are large geographically.
I agree that having support in lots of small towns is useful and important. It’s more that the color-coded map can give the impression that all geographic segments of the same size are equally important when they’re not.
A map like this:
looks a lot different than one weighted by population:
I still think there’s value in a geographic block of towns that can be counted upon. Of the 107 Western Mass towns I looked at, Markey exceeded 90% in 13, 80% in 39, 70% in 66, and 60% in 77. Elizabeth Warren and Deval Patrick, and even Martha Coakley, ran up similar percentages in those same towns. For purposes of statewide elections, the small towns of Western Mass. are so consistent in their voting patterns that I consider them the functional equivalent of precincts in, say, Newton or Cambridge, where most precincts come in big for a progressive candidate and a few lag.
Is there anyway to fix the above so the map doesn’t get covered by the ads on the east coast?
n/t
The top 7 cities/towns in terms of raw votes accounted for more than half the total margin of victory.
Boston is also an interesting data point. Even though Markey “only” won it by 5 or so percentage points, it gave him his 8th-highest vote margin, because of its size. But relatively small (population) towns like Northampton and Lexington could account for more of the victory margin than Boston because they were so lopsided and Boston was comparatively close.
Of course doing things by who won a town is somewhat arbitrary. Boston being four times larger than any other city in the state, even a small margin there in percentage terms is a lot of votes. On the flip side, Lynch “lost” Boston but got three times more votes there than in any other municipality.
Nonetheless, I ranked all 351 towns by Markey’s margin of victory. In the 250 towns he won, the cumulative margin was +122,709. The towns Lynch won, where Markey had a negative margin of victory, reduced that to about 79,900. A reduction of nearly 43,000.
Lynch’s seven best towns (in terms of margin) were Quincy, Braintree, Weymouth, Brockton, Norwood, Rockland, and Dracut. Together they reduced Markey’s margin of victory by nearly 19,000 votes, almost half the total reduction in margin of victory from the “Lynch” towns.
All caveats aside, there is some value to this. As you say, a lopsided win in Lexington can contribute more to a victory than a narrow win in much larger Boston. And many towns have a volunteer base via the town Dem committee and the town numbers speak to that, especially in a general election.