10 ms·

FiveThirtyEight: Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted

243 points by andres 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dewitt 14y ago
Mike Bostock of D3 fame is basically unrivaled in data visualization using HTML, SVG, and JS: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ Most of the code is open source, too: https://github.com/mbostock https://github.com/mbostock Awesome that he's working at the NYT alongside people like Nate Silver.
- kevinnk 14y ago
  I agree, this is a really, really cool visualization of something that would otherwise be rather difficult to understand. I've always known about the "Southern switch" but something like this really highlights it. Alabama in particular had a almost 83% change in the vote from 1960 to 1964 and a 73% swing back in 1968! It's also cool to see the slowly cyclical nature of the elections, although the wild swings from one party to another seem to have slowed down quite a bit.
  - lftl 14y ago
    The note to the left helps explain why Alabama was SO far to the right that year. LBJ wasn't even on the ballot in 64.
  - EvanMiller 14y ago
    This is data visualization gone wrong. I am afraid you have drawn a wildly incorrect conclusion because the programmers were too lazy to deal with the political and historical inconvenience of Gov. George C. Wallace, the Southern Dixiecrat and presidential nominee of the American Independent Party. Alabama didn't suddenly take 73% a left turn to vote for LBJ's vice president in 1968; they, along with Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Arkansas, voted for George Wallace, a candidate who made Richard Nixon look like Bob Dylan in comparison. Get the facts: http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968&f=0&off=0&elect=0 http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968&#3... The moral of the story (in my mind) is that while it's tempting to throw a big dataset into a cool visualization algorithm, if you're not careful about what each individual data point means, you might end up imparting more confusion and misconceptions than actual knowledge.
    - motoford 14y ago
      Great explanation. I saw that wild swing and when I hovered over and saw it was Alabama, I immediately said George Wallace. He might still be winning if health (and death) not got in the way. He even got around Alabama's consecutive term limits by having his wife elected governor.
  - impendia 14y ago
    Keep in mind that the parties used to stand for something different too. For example Strom Thurmond, a far-right-wing senator from South Carolina, was a Democrat until 1964.
    - infinite8s 14y ago
      Agreed. The southern democrats (otherwise known as dixiecrats) were the socially conservative, religiously motivated block, while the 'northern' republicans held social beliefs often associated with modern democrats.
btilly 14y ago
I would love to be able to switch to a visualization where each state is tracked by color according to how it votes now. (Or even better, starting at a random date.) That would make the great long-term swap between Republicans and Democrats much more obvious. Yes, we can mouse-over. But you can't easily mouse-over, scroll, and keep the mouse-over going.
- crazypyro 14y ago
  I wish we could click on a state and it would stay highlighted. That would be much easier, in my opinion.
  - andyl 14y ago
    Try clicking a state, then arrow-key up and down.
  - bcuccioli 14y ago
    In the left margin there's a button to make New Jersey and California stay highlighted. Right click -> inspect element -> and go from there :)
dmix 14y ago
It's not surprising to see the swaying support from citizens. What I'm curious about is given its a mixed economy and given the scale of the government (making change difficult), how much variability/difference is there between what the two parties can accomplish? I wouldn't be surprised to see that difference is quite narrow (10%). Although it's hard to quantify this stuff.
- kevinnk 14y ago
  I think you're right in the sense that the president doesn't really control things like the direction of the economy as much as most people think he does. However, I do think there are decisions that the president does have direct control over that have huge long term effects. For example, it's hard to imagine a Gore presidency would have had quite the same call to action in Iraq that the Bush presidency did, which really did have long term consequences on the economy and on the government as a whole.
maguay 14y ago
Really interesting to see that the states weren't as split in most elections pre-Bush Sr.
Dove 14y ago
I am always astonished by what an outlier DC is.
- netmau5 14y ago
  I'm not. If you ever visit, it's pretty clear where each economic group lives. Practically anyone with money who works in DC lives in VA or MD. DC has the highest ghetto per capita in the world.
  - azernik 14y ago
    It's not just the "ghetto" that votes Democratic - those suburbs are a major factor in the leftward swing of Virginia and Maryland over the last decade.
  - grecy 14y ago
    > DC has the highest ghetto per capita in the world. Do you have a source for that?
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - bmm6o 14y ago
      Of course he doesn't, the claim barely makes sense.
  - lurker14 14y ago
    Northwest DC has plenty of the whitest richest Democratic voters you'll find.
- jcdreads 14y ago
  It is almost entirely big city. Most American cities, considered by themselves, would be over there on the left with Washington. Here's a visualization of this; mostly bluer cities and mostly redder non-city: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/ http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/
ww520 14y ago
This is an amazing data visualization for historic data. Very interesting to see how the states shifted over time. California was solidly GOP before Clinton, how did they lose to Democrat afterward?
- rayiner 14y ago
  Population boom in the urban areas of LA, SF, etc.
  - jcampbell1 14y ago
    I think it has more to do with Reagan being a Califonia Goverernor, Nixon being a California Senator. The early 90s recession hit California particularly hard and Clinton trounced Bush in California.
- majormajor 14y ago
  The big swings left, though still overall on the right, for Ford after Nixon and GHW Bush after Reagan also foreshadow the eventual shift—Nixon and Reagan gained a lot due to being a California senator and governor, respectively, before running for President. (And for the Nixon era, that time's Republican party is a very different one than the one today. See also Texas being blue for Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, and Carter.)
- diego_moita 14y ago
  The main support for the Republicans was the Defense industry in Southern California. After the collapse of Soviet Union the defense industry shrunk. The only remains of it is Orange County. Meanwhile, you have the big influx of Latinos, that vote strongly Democrat.
mbell 14y ago
It would be awesome if this could somehow incorporate relative positions of the parties over time, perhaps by 'waving' the center line left-right as well. For example it could be argued that republicans during Nixon's time were closer to middle of the road democrats of today in terms of overall platform.
- derleth 14y ago
  > it could be argued that republicans during Nixon's time were closer to middle road democrats of today in terms of overall platform. That's because it's correct, depending on what you mean by 'middle road Democrat'. Nixon created the EPA, created OSHA, signed Title IX into existence, ended the Vietnam war, and endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, which nevertheless failed to pass. He couldn't have done a lot of those things without Congress, granted, but there wasn't a Tea Party back then, either. Now don't get me wrong: Nixon was a petty, vindictive ass who used the office of the President to pursue personal vendettas and ultimately authored his own downfall in a display of raw hubris worthy of a Greek tragic hero. The irony here was that with Watergate, he attempted to cheat his way to victory in the 1972 election, which was the biggest landslide anyone alive then will live to see. He threw away his entire future in politics trying to rig something that was a sure thing for him to win anyway. But enough on Nixon. Ronald Reagan was too liberal for most of the people who currently lionize him. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/05/10/even-reagan-wasn-t-a-reagan-republican.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/05/10/even-reagan... http://www.quora.com/Politics/Would-Ronald-Reagan-not-be-conservative-enough-for-todays-Republican-party http://www.quora.com/Politics/Would-Ronald-Reagan-not-be-con...
  - mbell 14y ago
    I explicitly worded it that way in an effort to avoid turning this into a political debate...
  - clarkmoody 14y ago
    Bigger landslide in 1984[1]... Cheating there too? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1984 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
marshallp 14y ago
Of course, none of this actually matters anymore. The corporo-verlords have bought both parties. The only way is parliamentary system with proportional representation. This isn't a political statement, just that hackers should investigate how to hack the system into that form. One clever hack is being done by John Koza (inventor of genetic programming) to do away with the electoral college http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/about.php http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/about.php . Some more hacking is needed.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Why do people love to act like both parties are the same? Is it just errant, broad pessimism? I understand wanting more options or not liking either available option but they're not the same. They don't have the same values, beliefs, principles, policies or experiences. They have many things in common, but they're not the same and it's not useless to talk about them and their perception in the polls.
  - antoko 14y ago
    Not that I speak for the GP but for me personally it is a question of relative similarity. My values compared to either one of the two main US parties are very different. Given that the relative similarities of the two parties it means they are effectively "the same". If I instead compare and contrast them with each other, obviously I can too can see that they are not "the same"
  - elsurudo 14y ago
    The point isn't that they're "the same". It's that they're the same _where it matters_. That they are both bought and paid for by the same corporate money. Where do the hundreds of millions to fund the campaigns come from? You don't think that those interests might, you know, want something in return? All mainstream political "discussion" is simply a distraction from the true issues. To think anything else is just naive.
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
pserwylo 14y ago
Can somebody from the US please tell me what the deal with the District of Columbia (on the far left) is? Also, this is another darn fine visualisation from the NYT.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  Big cities in the US tend to be extremely left wing. A quick google search reveals this map: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html New York County (Manhattan), Chicago and SF look a lot like DC. LA a bit less so, but that's probably because a lot of LA is suburban.
  - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
    Big cities in the US tend to be extremely moderately liberal, not extremely left wing. In any other industrialized country, the Democrats would be a conservative party.
    - astine 14y ago
      In any other country, the American left/right spectrum would not make sense.
- bobwaycott 14y ago
  In case you were asking why it's on the map in the first place, it's because even though it is not a state and was initially forbidden, as the seat of government, to cast votes for the Pres/VP, that changed in 1961 with the 23rd Amendment, which granted DC a number of electoral votes equal to the least populous state. It's interesting to note that the entire South did not ratify the amendment, except Tennessee. Also, DC still does not have separate representation in the Congress. More info: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-third_Amendment_to_the_...)
driverdan 14y ago
The NYT does great visualizations but wow, they need some serious front end performance work. 34 stylesheets, 22 JS files, multiple inline blocks of CSS and JS. It must take forever to load in older versions of IE and on mobile devices.

243 points by andres 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Mike Bostock of D3 fame is basically unrivaled in data visualization using HTML, SVG, and JS: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ Most of the code is open source, too: https://github.com/mbostock https://github.com/mbostock Awesome that he's working at the NYT alongside people like Nate Silver.

kevinnk 14y ago
I agree, this is a really, really cool visualization of something that would otherwise be rather difficult to understand. I've always known about the "Southern switch" but something like this really highlights it. Alabama in particular had a almost 83% change in the vote from 1960 to 1964 and a 73% swing back in 1968! It's also cool to see the slowly cyclical nature of the elections, although the wild swings from one party to another seem to have slowed down quite a bit.
- lftl 14y ago
  The note to the left helps explain why Alabama was SO far to the right that year. LBJ wasn't even on the ballot in 64.
- EvanMiller 14y ago
  This is data visualization gone wrong. I am afraid you have drawn a wildly incorrect conclusion because the programmers were too lazy to deal with the political and historical inconvenience of Gov. George C. Wallace, the Southern Dixiecrat and presidential nominee of the American Independent Party. Alabama didn't suddenly take 73% a left turn to vote for LBJ's vice president in 1968; they, along with Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Arkansas, voted for George Wallace, a candidate who made Richard Nixon look like Bob Dylan in comparison. Get the facts: http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968&f=0&off=0&elect=0 http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968&#3... The moral of the story (in my mind) is that while it's tempting to throw a big dataset into a cool visualization algorithm, if you're not careful about what each individual data point means, you might end up imparting more confusion and misconceptions than actual knowledge.
  - motoford 14y ago
    Great explanation. I saw that wild swing and when I hovered over and saw it was Alabama, I immediately said George Wallace. He might still be winning if health (and death) not got in the way. He even got around Alabama's consecutive term limits by having his wife elected governor.
- impendia 14y ago
  Keep in mind that the parties used to stand for something different too. For example Strom Thurmond, a far-right-wing senator from South Carolina, was a Democrat until 1964.
  - infinite8s 14y ago
    Agreed. The southern democrats (otherwise known as dixiecrats) were the socially conservative, religiously motivated block, while the 'northern' republicans held social beliefs often associated with modern democrats.

btilly 14y ago

I would love to be able to switch to a visualization where each state is tracked by color according to how it votes now. (Or even better, starting at a random date.) That would make the great long-term swap between Republicans and Democrats much more obvious. Yes, we can mouse-over. But you can't easily mouse-over, scroll, and keep the mouse-over going.

crazypyro 14y ago
I wish we could click on a state and it would stay highlighted. That would be much easier, in my opinion.
- andyl 14y ago
  Try clicking a state, then arrow-key up and down.
- bcuccioli 14y ago
  In the left margin there's a button to make New Jersey and California stay highlighted. Right click -> inspect element -> and go from there :)

dmix 14y ago

It's not surprising to see the swaying support from citizens. What I'm curious about is given its a mixed economy and given the scale of the government (making change difficult), how much variability/difference is there between what the two parties can accomplish? I wouldn't be surprised to see that difference is quite narrow (10%). Although it's hard to quantify this stuff.

kevinnk 14y ago
I think you're right in the sense that the president doesn't really control things like the direction of the economy as much as most people think he does. However, I do think there are decisions that the president does have direct control over that have huge long term effects. For example, it's hard to imagine a Gore presidency would have had quite the same call to action in Iraq that the Bush presidency did, which really did have long term consequences on the economy and on the government as a whole.

maguay 14y ago

Really interesting to see that the states weren't as split in most elections pre-Bush Sr.

Dove 14y ago

I am always astonished by what an outlier DC is.

netmau5 14y ago
I'm not. If you ever visit, it's pretty clear where each economic group lives. Practically anyone with money who works in DC lives in VA or MD. DC has the highest ghetto per capita in the world.
- azernik 14y ago
  It's not just the "ghetto" that votes Democratic - those suburbs are a major factor in the leftward swing of Virginia and Maryland over the last decade.
- grecy 14y ago
  > DC has the highest ghetto per capita in the world. Do you have a source for that?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - bmm6o 14y ago
    Of course he doesn't, the claim barely makes sense.
- lurker14 14y ago
  Northwest DC has plenty of the whitest richest Democratic voters you'll find.
jcdreads 14y ago
It is almost entirely big city. Most American cities, considered by themselves, would be over there on the left with Washington. Here's a visualization of this; mostly bluer cities and mostly redder non-city: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/ http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

ww520 14y ago

This is an amazing data visualization for historic data. Very interesting to see how the states shifted over time. California was solidly GOP before Clinton, how did they lose to Democrat afterward?

rayiner 14y ago
Population boom in the urban areas of LA, SF, etc.
- jcampbell1 14y ago
  I think it has more to do with Reagan being a Califonia Goverernor, Nixon being a California Senator. The early 90s recession hit California particularly hard and Clinton trounced Bush in California.
majormajor 14y ago
The big swings left, though still overall on the right, for Ford after Nixon and GHW Bush after Reagan also foreshadow the eventual shift—Nixon and Reagan gained a lot due to being a California senator and governor, respectively, before running for President. (And for the Nixon era, that time's Republican party is a very different one than the one today. See also Texas being blue for Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, and Carter.)
diego_moita 14y ago
The main support for the Republicans was the Defense industry in Southern California. After the collapse of Soviet Union the defense industry shrunk. The only remains of it is Orange County. Meanwhile, you have the big influx of Latinos, that vote strongly Democrat.

mbell 14y ago

It would be awesome if this could somehow incorporate relative positions of the parties over time, perhaps by 'waving' the center line left-right as well. For example it could be argued that republicans during Nixon's time were closer to middle of the road democrats of today in terms of overall platform.

derleth 14y ago
> it could be argued that republicans during Nixon's time were closer to middle road democrats of today in terms of overall platform. That's because it's correct, depending on what you mean by 'middle road Democrat'. Nixon created the EPA, created OSHA, signed Title IX into existence, ended the Vietnam war, and endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, which nevertheless failed to pass. He couldn't have done a lot of those things without Congress, granted, but there wasn't a Tea Party back then, either. Now don't get me wrong: Nixon was a petty, vindictive ass who used the office of the President to pursue personal vendettas and ultimately authored his own downfall in a display of raw hubris worthy of a Greek tragic hero. The irony here was that with Watergate, he attempted to cheat his way to victory in the 1972 election, which was the biggest landslide anyone alive then will live to see. He threw away his entire future in politics trying to rig something that was a sure thing for him to win anyway. But enough on Nixon. Ronald Reagan was too liberal for most of the people who currently lionize him. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/05/10/even-reagan-wasn-t-a-reagan-republican.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/05/10/even-reagan... http://www.quora.com/Politics/Would-Ronald-Reagan-not-be-conservative-enough-for-todays-Republican-party http://www.quora.com/Politics/Would-Ronald-Reagan-not-be-con...
- mbell 14y ago
  I explicitly worded it that way in an effort to avoid turning this into a political debate...
- clarkmoody 14y ago
  Bigger landslide in 1984[1]... Cheating there too? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1984 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

marshallp 14y ago

Of course, none of this actually matters anymore. The corporo-verlords have bought both parties. The only way is parliamentary system with proportional representation. This isn't a political statement, just that hackers should investigate how to hack the system into that form. One clever hack is being done by John Koza (inventor of genetic programming) to do away with the electoral college http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/about.php http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/about.php . Some more hacking is needed.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Why do people love to act like both parties are the same? Is it just errant, broad pessimism? I understand wanting more options or not liking either available option but they're not the same. They don't have the same values, beliefs, principles, policies or experiences. They have many things in common, but they're not the same and it's not useless to talk about them and their perception in the polls.
- antoko 14y ago
  Not that I speak for the GP but for me personally it is a question of relative similarity. My values compared to either one of the two main US parties are very different. Given that the relative similarities of the two parties it means they are effectively "the same". If I instead compare and contrast them with each other, obviously I can too can see that they are not "the same"
- elsurudo 14y ago
  The point isn't that they're "the same". It's that they're the same _where it matters_. That they are both bought and paid for by the same corporate money. Where do the hundreds of millions to fund the campaigns come from? You don't think that those interests might, you know, want something in return? All mainstream political "discussion" is simply a distraction from the true issues. To think anything else is just naive.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago

pserwylo 14y ago

Can somebody from the US please tell me what the deal with the District of Columbia (on the far left) is? Also, this is another darn fine visualisation from the NYT.

yummyfajitas 14y ago
Big cities in the US tend to be extremely left wing. A quick google search reveals this map: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html New York County (Manhattan), Chicago and SF look a lot like DC. LA a bit less so, but that's probably because a lot of LA is suburban.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  Big cities in the US tend to be extremely moderately liberal, not extremely left wing. In any other industrialized country, the Democrats would be a conservative party.
  - astine 14y ago
    In any other country, the American left/right spectrum would not make sense.
bobwaycott 14y ago
In case you were asking why it's on the map in the first place, it's because even though it is not a state and was initially forbidden, as the seat of government, to cast votes for the Pres/VP, that changed in 1961 with the 23rd Amendment, which granted DC a number of electoral votes equal to the least populous state. It's interesting to note that the entire South did not ratify the amendment, except Tennessee. Also, DC still does not have separate representation in the Congress. More info: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-third_Amendment_to_the_...)

driverdan 14y ago

The NYT does great visualizations but wow, they need some serious front end performance work. 34 stylesheets, 22 JS files, multiple inline blocks of CSS and JS. It must take forever to load in older versions of IE and on mobile devices.