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The most and least politically open-minded counties in the United States

3 points by andygcook 8y ago

ChrisRR 8y ago
Can someone explain to me as a non-American? What causes those hard boundaries in opinions along the state lines? Eg. Between Utah and Wyoming, or South Carolina and everywhere around it
- madcaptenor 8y ago
  I suspect a lot of the state-level stuff is artifacts of the algorithm. The article says that only 2000 people were polled, and there are about 3000 counties, so there's a lot of modeling that goes on to get from the poll results to the map. It's a two-step process: (1) build a model which predicts partisanship from individual demographics. (2) apply this to individual-level demographic data and aggregate to get partisanship by county. But! The demographics come from voter files. And voter files are maintained by the states. So the people overall in some county in South Carolina might be quite similar to those in a bordering county in North Carolina, but the ones in the voter file are not. I'd take within-state differences seriously, but I wouldn't take between-state differences seriously. (However! Utah is dominated by Mormons and you really do see differences in a lot of maps between Utah and adjacent states.)
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
> the most politically intolerant county in America appears to be Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes the city of Boston This surprises exactly nobody outside of the Boston area. >We are now judging one another’s fundamental decency based on whether we eat at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A This describes a running joke in my office perfectly. The "sieze the means" socialist prefers Chipotle and thinks Chick-Fil-a is terrible. The right leaning libertarian strongly prefers Chick-Fil-A and dislikes Chipotle. We all agree that Panera is overpriced for what it is, Market Basket has great deals on prepared food and the mayor of Boston has no business telling a business they're aren't welcome because he doesn't like who they give money to.

3 points by andygcook 8y ago

Can someone explain to me as a non-American? What causes those hard boundaries in opinions along the state lines? Eg. Between Utah and Wyoming, or South Carolina and everywhere around it

madcaptenor 8y ago
I suspect a lot of the state-level stuff is artifacts of the algorithm. The article says that only 2000 people were polled, and there are about 3000 counties, so there's a lot of modeling that goes on to get from the poll results to the map. It's a two-step process: (1) build a model which predicts partisanship from individual demographics. (2) apply this to individual-level demographic data and aggregate to get partisanship by county. But! The demographics come from voter files. And voter files are maintained by the states. So the people overall in some county in South Carolina might be quite similar to those in a bordering county in North Carolina, but the ones in the voter file are not. I'd take within-state differences seriously, but I wouldn't take between-state differences seriously. (However! Utah is dominated by Mormons and you really do see differences in a lot of maps between Utah and adjacent states.)

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

> the most politically intolerant county in America appears to be Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes the city of Boston This surprises exactly nobody outside of the Boston area. >We are now judging one another’s fundamental decency based on whether we eat at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A This describes a running joke in my office perfectly. The "sieze the means" socialist prefers Chipotle and thinks Chick-Fil-a is terrible. The right leaning libertarian strongly prefers Chick-Fil-A and dislikes Chipotle. We all agree that Panera is overpriced for what it is, Market Basket has great deals on prepared food and the mayor of Boston has no business telling a business they're aren't welcome because he doesn't like who they give money to.