Tag: states

There is nothing original about this short diary.  I just wanted to make you aware of an interesting Gallup survey from yesterday that measures President Obama’s approval in all 50 states:

Here’s the link:  http://www.gallup.com/poll/141…

You should go to “page 2” in the survey for a chart showing approval/disapproval by state. Also, here’s a map from the survey above:

The Gallup labeling appears slightly misleading to me because, while in all the states marked as “below average” Obama does have a net negative approval, in all the states marked as “above average” AS WELL AS in all the states marked as “average” his approval is a net positive.

The only “unpleasant surprises” to me are New Hampshire and Missouri.  On the other hand, there are a number of pleasant surprises, including Ohio, Colorado, South Dakota, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas.  The map almost looks like a very plausible near-future electoral college configuration to me, with the lightest green states going GOP, and the medium green and dark green ones going Democratic — maybe plausible in 2016 or 2020, that is !

After reading this entry http://www.fivethirtyeight.com… by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight about dividing Texas up into 5 states I became interested in other possibilities.  After all, as the second most populous state in the nation there is certainly enough people to make several decently sized states.  To pay homage to Nate Silver for the idea I decided to keep a few of the states names, one of which is almost identical to what he did since it was so awesome.  Using Daves redistricting application this is my vision of Texas.  A few major differences between the 538 version and my version is that I have no problem splitting up metropolitan areas.

Plainland

The plains of west Texas are conservative.  So conservative that Plainland would be the most conservative state in the United States giving Barack Obama a mere 24% of the vote to John McCain’s 75%.  If you are not familiar with Texas do not let the geographic size fool you, it is the least populated of the new states.  If a Liberal, Progressive or Democrat gets off on getting crushed in elections and wants to put on a token campaign Plainland is the place.

Population:  2,547,860

Demographics:  71% White, 4% Black, 23% Hispanic, 2% Asian

2008 Vote:  McCain 75% Obama 24% Other 1%

Major Cities:  Lubbock, Amarillo, Witchita Falls

Congressional Seats: 3

East Texas

East Texas is slightly more populated that Plainland.  The small population increase may be enough to give East Texas an additional congressional seat.  The partisan difference between Plainland and East Texas is minimal.  Giving Barack Obama 29% of the vote compared to John McCain’s 70%.  Don’t expect much love for Liberals, Progressives or Democrats here since Plainland would be the second most conservative state in the United States based on 2008 Presidential Election results.  East Texas expands down into the greater Houston Metro area and is home, like Plainland, to several of the lesser populated DFW Metro area counties.

Population:  2,775,191

Demographics:  75% White, 13% Black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian

2008 Vote:  McCain 70% Obama 29%, Other 1%

Major Cities:  Tyler, Longview, College Station-Byran

Congressional Seats: 4

Trinity

Names after the trio of major cities which comprise the majority of the states population, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington.  The four county conglomeration comprises the overwhelming majority of the population with the most of the remainder along I-35 running south including the cities of Waco, Killeen-Temple, Georgetown and Round Rock.  Dallas and Fort Worth would run the show and I suspect a death match of monumental proportions would ensue to see who gets the title of “State Capitol.”  At last we have a state where there is a county which voted for Barack Obama.  Dallas County gave Barack Obama a respectable 57% of the vote in 2008, also Dallas County has by itself has a population roughly equal to Plainland.  However in Trinity Dallas County was the only county to vote for Obama.  Based on the 2008 results Trinity would essentially be a smaller  version of old Texas mirroring the 55%-44% McCain-Obama results.  Given the large population Trinity would be home to 11 congressional seats.  

Population:  7,620,736

Demographics:  62% White, 13% Black, 20% Hispanic, 5% Asian

2008 Vote:  McCain 55% Obama 44%, Other 1%

Major Cities:  Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Waco

Congressional Seats: 11

Gulf Land

With a population of 9,142,795 Gulfland is the most populous of the new states.  Austin would remain as the state Capital and the largest city is Houston.  Barack Obama would have won Gulf Land in by a slim 3% margin, roughly 73,000 votes.  As a slightly GOP leaning swing state Democrats would have to rely on serious get out the vote efforts in Travis, Harris and Hidalgo Counties to pull off wins.  One item I have neglected to speak about up to this point is demographics.  As seen in Plainland and East Texas they are rather bland, very white, Trinity is a bit more diverse.  However Gulfland would join the rank of majority-minority states at 44% white, 38% hispanic, 13% black and 5% asian.  

Population:  9,142,795

Demographics:  44% White, 13% Black, 38% Hispanic, 5% Asian

2008 Vote:  Obama 51% McCain 48% Other 1%

Major Cities:  Houston, Austin, Corpus Christi, McAllen-Edinburg

Congressional Seats: 13

El Norte

This would be a Democratic strong hold.  Obama would have won El Norte with a 13% margin, larger than Pennsylvania.  The cities of San Antonio and El Paso bring the majority of the population here.  However El Norte is not that populous, in fact it’s population is only about half a million larger than Plainland.  However that may be enough to give El Norte 5 seats.  

Population:  3,155,854

Demographics:  28% White, 5% Black, 64% Hispanic, 4% Asian

2008 Vote:  Obama 56% McCain 43% Other 1%

Major Cities:  San Antonio, El Paso

Congressional Seats: 4 or 5

The congressional seat estimates were done in an incredibly rough manner.  

Cross-posted at Election Inspection 

(Note: due to formating issues, I didn't post the charts here, to see how Obama did compared to Kerry, visit the Election Inspection link) 

I've actually been quite interested in doing a comparison of how Obama did compared to the last Democratic nominee (Kerry). Here's the difference between Obama and Kerry's margins in each state (for reference, I subtracted Kerry's margin from Obama's margin to get the final number, for example, if Obama's margin in California was 24 and Kerry's margin was 9, the equation would be 24-9=15).

Obviously, since Obama won the popular vote by 7, while Kerry lost it by 3, Obama is going to outperform Kerry almost everywhere, and speaking of, the only states where Obama did not outperform Kerry were in Alaska (-1), Arkansas (-11), Louisiana (-4), Tennessee, (-1), Oklahoma (0), and West Virginia. This, however, only tells us what we already know, Obama outperformed Kerry almost everywhere. A more important question to ask would be, where did Obama do better than Kerry relative to how the entire country did (to put it another way, we know that Kerry won California by 9 points, but he lost the national popular vote by 3 points, so Kerry actually ran 12 points higher in California than in the country, and Obama, who won California by 24 points but won the popular vote nationwide by 7 points, performed 17 points better than the country at large. Subtracting Kerry's performance in California compared to the country at large from Obama's same performance means California voted 5 points more Democratic relative to to the rest of the country than it did 4 years ago).

So how did Obama do in these other states compared to the national vote relative to Kerry?

(Follow link at the top for a look at the relative performance of Obama to Kerry in each state)

This gives us a much better picture of which states, in any given year, are moving more Democratic, and which ones are stalling out. Of course, it would be smart to keep in mind that some of these numbers have to be taken in context of home state effects of presidential and vice presidential candidates (Arizona, Alaska, Illinois, Hawaii, and Delaware are the home-states of McCain, Palin, Obama, and Biden respectively; while Texas, Wyoming, Massachusetts, and North Carolina are the home-states of Bush, Cheney, Kerry, and Edwards, if some people over/underperform in certain states and regions, it has to be taken in this context). The glaring exception to the home-state advantage here is North Carolina, where Obama performed three points better relatively to his popular vote standing than Kerry did (and could easily be attributed to the growth of the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area). The states where Obama had the highest outperformance of Kerry's standing were in Hawaii (+26), Indiana (+12), North Dakota (+9), and a three-way tie between Utah, Montana, and Nebraska (+7 each). Obama's top under-performances, by comparison, were in Arkansas (-21), Louisiana (-14), Alaska (-11), Tennessee (-11), with a tie between West Virginia and Oklahoma (-10 each). There are, of course, a bunch of others, but generally speaking, we can say that by comparison, Obama generally underperformed Kerry in the south and the northeast (the exceptions being Vermont, Virginia, Georgia, Delaware, Connecticut, and North Carolina), while he generally outperformed Kerry in the midwest and the west, particularly where there was a large Hispanic population (New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and California). Obama seemed to stick pretty close to Kerry's relative performance in Washington State, Oregon, and Iowa (in fact, it seems that compared to the country, Iowa seems to have a consistant Democratic lean, as it changed exactly zero relative to the country)

This has extremely important ramifications for both presidential and down-ticket races in the future, for example, three states which Obama won which Kerry did not (Ohio, Florida, and Iowa) might seem to be massive improvements for the Democrats compared to how Kerry did, but in actuality, Obama underperformed Kerry relative to the rest of the country in Florida and Ohio, while Iowa stayed the same relative to the rest of the country (that is to say, in both 2004 and 2008, Iowa was roughly three points more Democratic than the country at large) (of course, for Ohio, Kerry actually did relatively better than most Democrats normally do in Ohio, but it usually tends to vote slightly more Republican than the rest of the country, whereas Ohio voted slightly LESS Republican than the national vote in 2008). Now, relatively speaking, Obama tended to GREATLY outperform Kerry in the midwest (Obama's relative performance in Wisconsin was 2 points better, in South Dakota was 3 points better, in Nebraska it was 7 points better, and a full 9 points better(!)). Of course, Obama did, relatively speaking, underperform Kerry in Minnesota, but that might be more a function of McCain spending a dispropotionate amount of time and resources in Minnesota (one of the only places where McCain was significantly outspending Obama on both field organization and advertising). The places where Obama really outperformed Kerry though were in the southwest and the mountain west (Obama outperformed Kerry by 3 points in Colorado, 4 points in Idaho, 5 points in Nevada, 5 points in California, , 6 points in New Mexico, 7 points in Montana, and 7 points in Utah. Like I said above, Obama did tend to underperform in the south, but the three places where Obama outperformed Kerry are states which have strong implications for state-wide Democrats are in Georgia (+2), North Carolina (+3), and Virginia (+4). The other two big deals are California (which has become almost as Democratic as New York) and Indiana (which went from being 18 points more Republican than the country to being only 6 points more Republican).

Democrats are probably going to have a harder time getting elected in Southern states like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, but strong Democrats are going to have a much easier time running in states like Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Furthermore, with California's gubenatorial race in 2010, if the Democrats don't rip each other apart like they did in 2006, they should have an extremely good chance at winning the governor's mansion, and controlling redistricting for the census.