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How well does population density predict U.S. voting outcomes?
- lemoncucumber 8y agoIt seems like the takeaway here is that population density only predicts voting outcomes among white voters.
- gowld 8y agoThat's a good hypothesis that should be answerable if there is county-level race data. Also, how good is "county-level" at correlating to population density? Some huge cities are their own counties, but are there many counties that have an urban seat and also outlying areas, with a significant split into two sections of similar population, but very different population density?
- pchristensen 8y agoI would be willing to bet that there's not a single county in the US with a population density higher than the population density of its largest city. (obviously city-county mergers like NYC, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, etc would have a ratio of 1.) Indeed, most counties that have any town of > 20k people and that are not dominated by a huge city probably fit your criteria.
- madcaptenor 8y agoI'm having trouble finding data on this where all the populations are from the same time, but Forsyth and Gwinnett counties in Georgia might be counterexamples. (Their largest cities, Cumming and Peachtree Corners respectively, are hardly cities so much as just bits carved out of North Atlanta suburban sprawl.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- blattimwind 8y ago> county-level race data Maybe you find a database of brain volumina to cross-correlate, too. Now that'd be real interesting, phrenology-wise.
- pattrn 8y agoI don't see much supporting evidence in the article for your claim. Aside from some conjecture about race included at the end of his analysis, the article doesn't show error based on racial breakdown of the analyzed regions. I'm not sure based on the article how you're arriving at this conclusion.
- kodablah 8y agoNot true. Tarrant county, specifically mentioned in the article, would be an example of higher density whites voting more Republican than might be expected.
- anoncoward111 8y agoTarrant county (Fort Worth TX) is basically ground-zero for what I call the "McMansion White". I define them as: A white, suburban dwelling American, typically married with kids, making about $33,000 per year per parent and spending every dime of it on housing, transport, food, clothes and entertainment. This person is not particularly securely employed and not particularly financially secure, thus harbors a great deal of resentment for people that don't have a similar lifestyle and consumption pattern.
- baddox 8y agoOne similar hypothesis that comes to mind is that perhaps ethnic/cultural homogeneity predicts voting outcomes. That might synthesize the effects of population density (since denser areas might tend to be more diverse) as well as skin color (since homogenous areas might tend to be homogeneously white).
- clircle 8y agoModel looks like it would benefit from a quadratic term based on the scatter plot
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- darkmighty 8y agoI'd chose a logistic-like curve to fit (since extrapolating to infinite population the ratio should approach 1 and 0 population it should approach 0).
- carbocation 8y agoI'm actually wondering if the model was fixed to have an intercept at (0, 0). That line looks way off.
- btilly 8y agoI wonder at the same thing. Allow the intercept to change and you'll get a massively better predictor. That will also stop moderately higher density counties from being green, and moderately lower density ones from being pink.
- superseeplus 8y agoHow does population density affect the impact of an individual vote?
- curo 8y agoI think the left would respond that urban populations are diverse & educated. And the right would respond that it's hard to preach conservative values of individual liberty and personal responsibility (e.g., leave me alone, i'll leave you alone) when people are living on top of one another.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"individual liberty and personal responsibility (e.g., leave me alone, i'll leave you alone) " Those are not conservative values, those are libertarian values, we might call them 'liberal' in the rest of the world (well, kind of, using that phraseology like 'leave me alone, i leave you alone' is kind of a American colloquial/populist or crude way of expressing it - in fact it doesn't describe classical Liberalism very well at all, but nevertheless someone with that ethos would definitely fall under this camp, and not Conservatism) Classically Conservative 'values' (though not necessarily politics) are more: family, community, responsibility towards community, faith, tradition, duty etc.. Conservative and Libertarian values clash distinctly in the are of 'community' - one is individualist, one is instinctively though often not obviously community oriented. 'Duty' is generally a conservative concept you don't hear much in the Libertarian leaning crowd. But it's moot as far as this article is concerned: The data in this article is highly problematic due to the fact that most newcomers move to the cities, and so it entirely skews the data. It's not an argument of 'disperse vs. dense' - it's really just a proxy for ethnography. From the link in the comment above [1]: "population density and percent black will do a lot to obliterate many a suggestively-patterned map of the United States. Those two variables aren’t explanations of anything in isolation, but if it turns out it’s more useful to know one or both of them instead of the thing you’re plotting, you probably want to reconsider your theory." [1] https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur-choropleths/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur...
- astrodust 8y agoHow well does the average number of bullet holes in road signs predict US voting outcomes? How well does the number of Pumpkin Spice lattes sold per capita predict US voting outcomes?
- jcfrei 8y agoI think the data from Alaska should be excluded, all counties have the same ratio.
- jake-low 8y agoThanks for pointing that out! It looks like every county in Alaska is just showing the state-level vote ratio. Might have to do with Alaska having boroughs instead of counties? I'll look into this later; I've added a disclaimer at the bottom of the notebook for now.
- crznp 8y agoIt looks like the data is being pulled from Townhall, which has the same issue [1]. Wikipedia has seems to have the data [2], though the percentages are a little different (51.3% for Trump rather than 52.9%). Perhaps it is wrong because not all land in Alaska is part of a borough, Eg: Nome is listed separately, but it is just a census area. Interesting that it seems to have the reverse trend -- Anchorage and Fairbanks went for Trump while much of the unorganized borough went to Clinton. [1] - https://townhall.com/election/2016/president/ak/county https://townhall.com/election/2016/president/ak/county [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Alaska,_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
- jake-low 8y agoYou rock for looking into this. When I have a chance I'll merge the Wikipedia data into the dataset I'm using. Thanks!
- tonmcg 8y agoI'm the author of the GitHub repo that Jake references and the reason I stated Alaska totals at the state level is because elections there are administered at the precinct level, which have no county equivalent. Alaska's "county equivalents", as the U.S. Census calls them, are known as Census Areas, Municipalities, and Boroughs. But again, there are no election data reported at those levels. See here for more detail: https://github.com/tonmcg/US_County_Level_Election_Results_08-16/issues/2#issuecomment-321474450 https://github.com/tonmcg/US_County_Level_Election_Results_0...
- madcaptenor 8y agoAmerica's ur-choropleths: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur-choropleths/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur...
- jakemor 8y agoRuntimeError: us could not be resolved on safari iPhone X :'(
- ianai 8y agoTLDR: “this exercise demonstrates what we already know: voter preference is complicated, and while it is affected by population density, there are too many other factors for that metric alone to be a good predictor”
- wool_gather 8y agoDid we actually know that before investigating, or did we just have a guess?
- ianai 8y agoThat’s a quote from the article.
- jake-low 8y agoHey, author here. Definitely didn't expect to see this on the front page when I woke up. A friend posed the question in the title to me last week after seeing the referenced NYT map, and I spent the last couple evenings making this notebook to try and answer it. Let me know if you have any questions; I'll try my best to answer them.
- zellyn 8y agoYour first link goes nowhere, btw…
- madcaptenor 8y agoI think it would be interesting to see the results of regressing vote against population density + racial makeup.
- jake-low 8y agoI agree. The vote dataset doesn't have demographic breakdowns (I believe it was created by scraping post-election reports on _The Guardian_, not by relying on exit polls). But you compare the prediction errors to county-level data on race (the Census Bureau publishes these numbers) and pose the question "is the population-density model more wrong in areas of higher diversity?"
- donovanr 8y agoVery nice. It might be worth worth weighting each data point in proportion to the population it represents.
- andrewla 8y agoOf note is that graphing the logarithm of population density is really just the same as taking the difference between log(pop) and log(area). It might be worth tackling this as a linear model of those two separately rather than combining them together.
- kodablah 8y agoNaive question, can we just "backfit" sets of county metrics based on results of the last few elections to determine which ones have effect? Surely with a large enough set of metrics (i.e. all combinations of density, race, and gender), a large enough sample size (all counties in this case), and over multiple elections (albeit all reasonably recent to avoid historical shifts), we can determine the set of metrics which are the highest predictors with the fewest exceptions without appearing to rely too much on correlation.
- microcolonel 8y ago> Naive question, can we just "backfit" sets of county metrics based on results of the last few elections to determine which ones have effect? Despite what people say, the candidates in a given party differ considerably between elections (sometimes even if they are exactly the same person). "Backfitting" could only give you the trend among "lifelong democrats" and "lifelong republicans", which thankfully are not a majority of voters.
- bsherrill 8y agoPopulation density = media consumption
- jrockway 8y agoIn what direction? People in New York are all walking around reading Instagram, people in Kansas are sitting at home watching Fox News. Which group consumes more is not clear to me.
- rmason 8y agoThere's a factor this research overlooked and that's intensity. Bernie Sanders won the Michigan primary with high turnout in Detroit. Those voters stayed home in November and that was the difference. Even with the swing in Macomb county of Obama Democrats voting for Trump that was much discussed by the national media it still could have been overcome with a 2012 turnout level in Detroit. I'd be curious if that was replicated in other states.
- rossdavidh 8y agoMy impression: staying home is a way of voting for some people. There are some (many?) people who have so strongly identified with one party, that when they are upset with it and want to "vote against" it, they still cannot bring themselves to vote for another party, as that seems a violation of their core identity. So, staying home is how they vote for the other party. It only counts half as much, of course. So, in this example, there might be some black voters who cannot bring themselves to vote Republican, no matter what, but if they are upset with the Democratic party they may stay home. Similarly, Christian conservatives who don't like the Republican candidate may not be willing to vote Democratic, but they might be willing to skip voting. Just a hypothesis, of course, I have no data to back that up.
- tareqak 8y agoI've actually wondered if having a two-system form of government to deal with the urban-rural divide would be effective in governing. Basically, a government for urban-dwellers with one set of tax rates, services, and laws, and another government with another set of tax rates, services, and laws for rural-dwellers. There would be a common overarching government over the two for dealing with common interests e.g. military, international affairs, necessary infrastructure. Something that I've wondered as part of this idea is why states after the original thirteen colonies became geographically larger in size. In hindsight, it seems much harder to have common interests across a numerically large group of people spread over a larger physical area. Afterthought: I forgot to mention that the parts that are urban, and the parts that rural would have to be re-evaluated over time to see if that classification still holds or merits changing.
- merpnderp 8y agoHmm, you could call this type of government a federated system. Have it broken into different states and counties, maybe with local city governments. Enumerate some powers reserved for each while keeping a central authority to make sure everyone is assured at least a minimum of rights. Naw, would never last.
- mcculley 8y agoIt didn't last.
- politician 8y agoActually, what happened is that the boundaries became immutable concrete while the population concentrations varied. At this point, we should redraw all state lines, and raise the number of elected officials in the House and Senate.
- int_19h 8y agoIt won't if you don't actually draw the lines between states accordingly. (Counties don't mater, because they don't possess any sovereignty - they only have such political power as the legislature of the respective state gives them.)
- cmurf 8y agoI grew up in Kansas and up until about 15 years ago it bounced back and forth between Democrats and Republicans frequently. And in my dad's era, post war, pretty much everyone was a Democrat, whether urban or rural. And then the parties have flipped ideologies substantially (Southern Democrats, and then Nixon-Atwater Southern Strategy Republicans), and even arguably in 2016 you get a rather substantial 180 degrees with Trump Republicans who suddenly became anti-globalism (domestic capitalism, global mercantilism). So on the one hand, you need more data over more elections to see if there's correlation, but then that adds noise. At a national level, the parties have sub-parties within them where in consensual democracies they'd be separate parties, it's not a strictly two party system like you see in majoritarian democracies. And this is always in flux. Another source of noise is just the nature of the 2016 presidential election. Possibly a better source to reduce noise? U.S. senate races. They're statewide like a presidential race, the term is 6 years, but the lack of national media hype involved in the campaigns makes them less emotional and the data might be more stable. The incumbency problem might make it useless.
- tptacek 8y agoThe ideological "sort" of conservatives into the Republican party and liberals into the Democratic party is a recent phenomenon. As recently as the late 1970s, the Republican party wasn't even clear on its stance on abortion. The sort was set in motion after Reagan was elected and wasn't really completed until after the Contract With America years.
- cryptonector 8y agoThere was a long time of Democrat domination of the southern states' politics from the end of Reconstruction that didn't end until about sixteen years ago. It's hard to assign ideological values like left/right, or even positions of, e.g., capitalism vs. not-capitalism, to the parties before the 70s, and even since (with some exceptions). The Democratic party had something of a flirtation with the left side of the spectrum in FDR, but it wasn't anything like a defining characteristic of the party back then, and JFK went pretty much in the other direction. The Republican party had Presidents like Coolidge, who would definitely be on the right side of the spectrum, but also Nixon, who gave us price controls and proposed single-payer health care. It's all a bit of a mishmash with a few salient exponents of somewhat-consistent ideology here and there, like Presidents Teddy Roosevelt (a progressive of sorts), FDR, Reagan, and now Trump. Things do seem to be clarifying in recent times, but even so, it's still not always all very clear. The fact is that the individual candidates have more going for or against them than just party affiliation or ideology.
- cmpolis 8y agoWhat's up with the line of points at y=0.3772? seems anomalous
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jake-low 8y agoIt's Alaska, as noted in the footnotes of the article; I think each borough is showing the vote ratio for the whole state rather than the borough-level data. Sorry about that; I'll make some time to look into it later.
- DougN7 8y agoThis is really interesting. Nice job! Something I’ve always wondered though is whether it’s cause or effect. In other words, does living in high density areas make liberal causes more important to a person, or is a liberal person more drawn to high density (big cities). And the inverse for conservatives.
- rossdavidh 8y agoYou might be interested in reading "The Big Sort": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2569072-the-big-sort https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2569072-the-big-sort The long and the short of it is, it's both.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoOne election does not a trend make. But perhaps also looking at previous elections - national and local - would reveal trends / patterns? I saw a comment below where the author said the data didn't have demographics. That's understandable. But what about population change? This was interesting.
- c3534l 8y agoIt seems pretty obvious to me that the line is a bit off. If you allowed it to have a negative y-intercept or allowed some kind of an S-curve you'd reduce the error dramatically.
- jrockway 8y agoThe biggest question I have is, did population density change between 2008 and 2016 to skew the result of the elections in different directions? My intuition is that it did not, and thus it doesn't predict much.
- Gibbon1 8y agoThe error with that thinking is that an election is a one bit sampling function. Small shifts can flip the result. This is why I'm dubious about polls as a way of guiding campaigns.
- httpz 8y agoI think it's trying to predict the regional outcome not the outcome of the whole election. Also, with the electoral system, any slight shift in a few swing states can change the whole election.
- adverbly 8y agoWhat is up with Richmond county? Quite the outlier there.
- cageface 8y agoThis is another analysis that proposes a more convincing model (IMO) for the voting patterns in the US based on colonial history & culture. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/urban-rural-united-states-regions-midterms.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/urban-rural-unite...
- blang 8y agoI'm not sure how accurate this data is, but it seems to draw a similar conclusion: https://overflow.solutions/special-projects/each-congressional-district-ranked-by-population-density-colored-by-political-party-of-the-representative/ https://overflow.solutions/special-projects/each-congression...
- ersiees 8y agoDid not work on my iPhone 6 in Germany. Saw a lot of: “ RuntimeError: us could not be resolved“
- jacobolus 8y agoTry this one https://beta.observablehq.com/d/64da99d0a15ecb6a https://beta.observablehq.com/d/64da99d0a15ecb6a
- crazygringo 8y agoThe "difference" map (third one, green/pink) is one of the clearest, most intuitive and educational visualizations I've seen in a long time. The "Black belt" line is so clearly revealing. I wish "difference from trend" maps were more popular, and more prevalent in the media -- this would be a tremendous asset in the classroom as well when teaching statistics. Kudos!
- jake-low 8y agoThank you! I'm flattered. I like that map too, and I'm definitely interested in making more "difference from trend" choropleth maps in the future.
- jacobolus 8y agoIf you want it to work in Safari or Edge (or other ES6 compliant browsers), you can use Object.assign(foo, {'a': 'b', etc.}) Instead of {...foo, 'a': 'b', etc.} For example, https://beta.observablehq.com/d/64da99d0a15ecb6a https://beta.observablehq.com/d/64da99d0a15ecb6a
- mamp 8y agoObject spreads work in Safari (I'm using 11).
- mrtnmcc 8y agoInteresting how there was a green (bias for Clinton) along the southern borderline. Do they not like The Wall?
- kibwen 8y agoIt's not just Texans near the border: "Statewide, 61 percent of Texans oppose building a wall, while 35 percent support it and 4 percent don’t know or declined to answer, according to a poll conducted in April by Texas Lyceum, a nonprofit leadership organization." https://www.star-telegram.com/news/state/texas/article152402734.html https://www.star-telegram.com/news/state/texas/article152402... (Link to study, sample size 1000: https://www.texaslyceum.org/page-18205 https://www.texaslyceum.org/page-18205 )
- davidw 8y agoLiving in close proximity to other people makes you more conscious of externalities.
- jfoutz 8y ago"It predicted that Tarrant county, with 904 people per km², would support Clinton, while Zavala County, with 3.6 people per km², would support Trump. In fact, the reverse was true."
- adrr 8y agoTarrant is a very fast-growing county. The population has doubled over 20 years. Be interesting to see 2008 and 2012 results to see if there is a trend.
- ArnoVW 8y agoThe Economist had an interesting article this summer about this subject, covering it from historical, statistical and political angles : https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/07/12/americas-electoral-system-gives-the-republicans-advantages-over-democrats https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/07/12/americas-elect...
- williesleg 8y agoSo there are stereotypes then?
- moultano 8y agoDoes a logistic fit work better?
- pishpash 8y agoWhy would one try to fit a line to this?