Mapping the exit polls: Obama job approval and Democratic favorability

So I was browsing through the exit poll results, as one does after an election, especially one gone badly wrong. And I thought I'd map out some of the state-by-state results. (I really hope someone else here hasn't already been doing this; if so – my apologies.)

Arguably, part of the usefulness of exit polls is that they are a kind of substitute for regular opinion polls, just with a massively larger sample, and conducted strictly among actual voters, rather than a likely or registered voter screen. So what did they say about Obama's job approval? And what did they say about how the voters looked upon the Democratic and the Republican Party?

Moreover, what do those things look like on a map? Because you need maps. Maps are cool.

According to the national exit poll, with some 17,5k respondents, a combined 45% of voters somewhat or strongly approve of how Obama is handling his job as President.

I thought this was surprisingly high. After all, the population that turned out to vote was a relatily hostile selection: only 45% of the voters said that they had voted for Obama in 2008, while another 45% said they had voted for McCain. So you would expect that these voters approved less of Obama than a wider registered voter or voting-age population sample would. Yet the 45% approval rate the exit poll found is right in line with what opinion polls have been finding since July.

The national exit poll found that 43% of the voters had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party. Almost the same share, 42%, had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. Those numbers are roughly in line with what the last two polls on the question that are listed at Polling Report, by CNN and CBS, found. Those found a 46% favorability rating for the Dems, and 44% and 41% ratings for the Republicans.

While job approval and favorability aren't the same thing and Obama's favorability rating would probably have been a couple of percentage points higher, I still thought it was striking that these three numbers are so close to one another.

How do the numbers vary from state to state (here's Arizona)? I tabulated the values for these questions for all the states that were covered in the exit poll in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

I used the Google Charts Wizard to create the below maps. They're really, really plain. Annoyingly, I didn't figure out how to include legends. Or titles for that matter. If someone knows how to tweak the URL to include them, or has a better easy mapping tool to suggest, thank you very much! Some of you guys make amazing maps. (I tried Manyeyes, but its color range doesn't quite work for these values, other than in the bottommost map; plus, ManyEyes and SSP don't work well together, since SSP doesn't accept the "style" tag).

Obama job approval:

In lieu of a legend: basically, I set bright green to reflect a 33% approval; yellow to relfect a 50% approval; and bright red to reflect a 67% approval.

There is only one state that falls just outside this range: West-Virginia, where Obama's job approval among mid-term voters was in the tank at just 30%. I set bright blue to reflect a 17% approval, so that's why WV appears as a blueish green.

Democratic Party favorability:

I used the same colour range as above, so they are directly comparable. This does mean that this map doesn't have a lot of color range. First off, in some of the states with the highest Obama job approval (VT, NY, HI), this question wasn't asked. Secondly, interestingly, opinions about the Democratic Party are less polarized.

In some of the states with a high Obama job approval (CA, OR, DE), opinions about the party were less favorable. Whereas in some of the states with a low Obama job approval (IN, KY, AR, and above all, WV), the party was viewed more favorably. So it all levels out a bit more.

The Manyeyes mapping tool did do a good job in neatly illustrating this contrast. Where does Obama's job approval outdo the party's favorability rating, and where is it the other way round?

In short, the West likes Obama better than it does the Democratic Party; but the Appalachian Midwest (for lack of a better label) probably doesn't, even taking into account the apples/oranges aspect of comparing job approval and favorability. West-Virginia really doesn't. While Obama's job approval, as noted, is down at 30%, the Democratic Party's favorability rating is up at a decent 45%. That 15-point difference compares to difference of at most 7 points in all the other exit poll states.

I want to do more maps focusing on exit polls results on opinions about the Tea Party; the shares of the electorates identifying themselves as liberal and conservative; opinions about the health care law; the Democratic share of the white electorate with under and over $50,000 incomes; and opinions on whether the government should do more or is already doing too much. Please warn me if this has all already been done. 🙂