NH-Sen, DC-Mayor: M is for Map

…and that’s good enough for me; I hope that’s good enough for you, too!

Two quick ones today, one of New Hampshire and one of DC.

First, New Hampshire:

Green for Ayotte, red for Ovide. Binnie and Bender each won exactly one town, Binnie’s down on the Massachusetts line (blue) and Bender’s way up in Coos County (purple). As you can tell, Lamontagne did very well in the cluster around Manchester.

Second, DC, but let’s play a game.

Pop quiz for all you hotshots – what are the following maps?

Hard to tell, right? Answer over the flip.

Stephen Colbert’s not far off when he described DC as the “Chocolate City with Marshmallow Center”, though it might more accurately be termed, the Chocolate East half and the Marshmallow West half…but that, of course, isn’t as catchy.

The map on the left is the percentage of the population that was Black at the 2000 census by block group (blue being a lower%); the map on the right is the margin between Fenty and Gray by precinct (blue for Fenty, red for Gray). Two larger versions below, with the color scale modified (darker green indicating a higher percentage of African-Americans)…the correlation is quite stunning.

13 thoughts on “NH-Sen, DC-Mayor: M is for Map”

  1. First post here on SSP (been reading for about a year though), but as I am currently living in DC I feel like I can offer a little bit of insight.

    The maps wonderfully illustrates what everyone here in the city basically knew, which was that even though both candidates were African-American, Fenty had been accused of not being “black enough” and therefore lost most of his support in the black community.

    You can really see this on the maps, as the whole Northwest portion, basically Georgetown, which is the darkest blue area on the bottom map, Chevy Chase and “suburban DC”, etc. went overwhelmingly Fenty, as did Capitol Hill, which is the little spot of blue you see in the center right, surrounded by red (Hill staffers and lobbyists). It’s just that these areas aren’t as densely populated as the red areas, and weren’t as motivated to get out to vote this time around.

    There has been a lot of chatter about Fenty trying to run as an indy (which he can’t do) or on the GOP line. The DC GOP basically doesn’t exist, their primary ballot consisted of all write-ins, which would allow Fenty to theoretically be nominated by them. That would be quite intriguing I think, since he garnered only 10k votes less than Gray in the closed Dem primary. In the general you would have to think that he would taket he overwhelming majority of the District’s Republicans (about 40k) and a good portion of the “NP”s or independents (about 75k). Assuming he maintains his Dem support, that would put him over the top in the general. Of course this is all moot since he declared last night that he is “done with politics”. It would make a great story however and I think the results might be really interesting.

    Sorry for the long post, keep up the good work here.  

  2. I had the two maps reversed.

    I didn’t know Capitol Hill was that white and knew Fenty did well there since he carried Ward 6 and Ward 6 has a few areas that are mostly black and where I doubt Fenty did particularly well.  (Although now that I think more about it, Ward 6 also now includes much of downtown and the SW waterfront, which had generally been in Ward 2 prior to the remapping.)

    The remapping was interesting from a demographic point of view and underlined the changes in the city. Essentially, the areas east of the Anacostia lost enough population that most of the eight wards had to shift to the west. Previously, Ward 7 and 8 and a portion of Ward 6 were east of the river, but now Ward 7 crosses over (to the area around RFK Stadium) and Ward 6 does not. The end result is a Ward 6 where whites will probably always cast more votes than blacks, which caused a fair amount of consternation in some circles.  

    The other big change was that Ward 3, essentially the whitest, most affluent, and most suburb-like part of DC had to shrink, both because it was least affected to DC’s poulation loss of all wards and because Ward 2 got pushed further uptown. So Ward 4 jumped Rock Creek Park into Chevy Chase. This proved pretty controversial in the sense that a mostly white neighborhood was transferred into Ward 4, which is otherwise mostly black and entirely on the other side of Rock Creek Park, which is pretty wide up there. (It’s not anywhere nearly entirely a racial thing, as parking permits are zoned by wards and Chevy Chase residents lost residential parking privileges in nearby Ward 3 neighborhoods that they had gotten used to. But if I understand correctly, those permits have been defined more narrowly in many other instances as well now.)

    It’ll be interesting to see how Mayor-Elect Gray and the new council handle things. There’s a lot of people out there fearful that we’ll see something of a return of the Marion Barry days when no one expected much of anything good out of DC government or its employees.  

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