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November 1, 2009 -
As jobs vanish, factory towns slow to see stimulus - Comment:
See the interesting chart of
alleged jobs created or saved by the stimulus bill by county,
and then compare that to the 2008 "Electoral
Explorer" map by county to see the political connections at
a glance. |
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January 2009 -
Thanks to the New York Times for creating an interesting "Electoral
Explorer" tool, and to
Karl Rove for
calling attention to it, along with his own excellent analysis (as
usual) of the 2008 presidential election results. Hopefully both
will leave these tools available for a while. Voters will need
some time to assess what they really got for their vote this time. |
| It's
basically a way to use GIS mapping technology to compare the election
results data by county against the demographic patterns of those
counties as provided by the latest US Census data. There are
various ways to look at the data - by income, unemployment levels, and
other metrics. |
| July
2009 update - Karl Rove has published an interesting chart with the
dismal June
job growth numbers. |
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Having fun with the Electoral Explorer
tool: analysis by median county income levels |
| You
can slide the default range settings, such as from a low to a high
income level, to see how it affects the vote results. For example,
at the national level, try sliding the lower income setting up to
$20,000 and the upper income setting to $40,000, and see who wins in
this demographic. Surprise! It's John McCain. Not
exactly consistent with the prevailing assumption that only rich people
vote Republican. |
| Now,
try sliding the upper income bracket to the right. Surprise!
The higher the upper median income goes, the higher the support for
Obama goes. I guess that means rich people think they can afford
liberalism, while ordinary working Americans on tight budgets (like the
legendary "Joe the Plumber") may be a bit more skeptical.. |
| Now
zoom in on your own state, and mouse over the various counties around
you, to see the median income of your county, and how the county voted. |
| Now,
zoom back out again to the national level. Slide the upper income
range to the maximum (just under $100,000 in the few most affluent
counties in America) and move the lower range up to $50,000.
Surprise! Obama wins 55% of these counties, versus 44% for McCain
- a wider margin than the overall election results.. |
| Now,
try sliding the lower end of the median income scale down to the minimum
($16,868) and slide the upper end of the scale down to around $40,000.
McCain has about 52%. Now slide the lower scale up from the
minimum to closer to the $40,000 maximum. Surprise! At
almost every income level in between, McCain wins. |
| Now,
do the opposite. Set the lower range at around $45,000 and slide
the upper range at any point between there and the maximum of nearly
$100,000. Surprise! Obama wins these counties at almost
any income level. |
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What about American manufacturing
jobs? |
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Here's another fun exercise. Switch to the map view for the level
of manufacturing jobs in a county. Set the lower range at 12%, and
the higher range at the maximum of 87%. Slide the lower range
toward the higher level (i.e., higher concentration of manufacturing
jobs in the county). Surprise! McCain wins by a rising
margin as the level goes up. Of course, after you pass around 50%
it's pretty irrelevant because so few counties are left on the map. |
| Try
setting the lower range at 10% (still on % of manufacturing jobs in the
county) and lower the upper range to a relevant figure such as 50%.
That focuses on counties where manufacturing is still a very significant
factor. In short, how did the industrial counties of this country
vote? Forget the cumulative vote total for a
moment. Just look at the map. There's one heck of a lot of
red counties, even though the population and Obama preference of the
blue counties exceeds their vote total. |
| Now,
set the lower end at 0% manufacturing jobs, and slide the upper range
down to 10%. These are the counties where manufacturing may no
longer be the driving factor behind "job creation".
Surprise! That's still an awfully red map, but
Obama wins the vote total by a wide margin. On closer inspection,
however, the blue counties are largely some small, but heavily
populated, urban areas and some affluent parts of California, Colorado,
and other places, including south Texas and Florida (which may represent
the impact of the Hispanic vote). |
| Once
again, this is not a country in which a president is elected by popular
vote totals. There are a lot of "blue states" in the electoral
college map (see Karl Rove's website) which are still predominantly red
in their industrial counties, and even in those which are not
industrial, such as farming and ranch regions.
The votes of all those industrial and farm workers, however, just get
overwhelmed by all the more affluent workers in the expensive urban
areas, which may be losing their industrial base. In the places
where new manufacturing jobs are actually being created or saved, rather
than lost, it's not very blue.
The notion that the Democrats are the party of the
hard-working manufacturing workers of this country seems to be a myth.
They have a strong union base in some major cities, and that overwhelms
the voting impact of all the manufacturing workers in other counties
across the country. The manufacturing workers in the cities may
buy into the liberal message as they fear loss of their jobs, but in the
rest of the country these workers don't really seem to be buying the
idea that more government is the answer. |
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Draw your own conclusions - don't
accept what the news media or pundits tell you |
| Of
course, electors in the Electoral College are not picked by the number
of county election majorities. |
| The
point is that we need to be cautious about making assumptions about the
wisdom of ordinary, hard-working American voters at lower income levels
versus those at higher income levels. It's not really the less
affluent people of this country who dream of liberalism.
They may feel that life is tough, and they might welcome
some help, but they still "get it" that the American Dream isn't to live
on government transfers of wealth.
Their dream is to work hard to get ahead through their
own efforts and thereby create greater prosperity for their own families
and communities, rather than have their government invest in supporting
somebody else. |
| The
other point is that, as a "progressive" income tax system, meaning that
people who earn more generally pay more in taxes, with the most affluent
(top 10%) paying the most by far, the people who still "get it" are the
ones who are paying very little in taxes at all. Those earning
less than $40,000 - $45,000 aren't the ones paying most of the federal
taxes. Even so, they didn't vote for the liberal
agenda to "bail them out" through government. They may actually
believe that they can work themselves out of the economic mess which
government has inflicted on them with allegedly good intentions over the
years. |
| As
Karl Rove noted in his blog entry of November 10 ("Blue and Red"),
"Obama won 864 counties, up from Kerry’s 583 four years ago, but still
far short of McCain’s 2,234 counties." The idea that the country
has swung decisively and irreversibly to the Democrats should not be
accepted. In the 2010 election and subsequently,
Republicans should be able to regain many seats in the House and Senate,
especially if the Democrats try to quickly impose many changes and the
economy does not recover. They are already proposing massive
spending, while at the same time arguing that it will take many years to
have an impact, thus trying to evade any accountability for the
consequences of what they are doing now. There wasn't a massive
shift in voting patterns. Conservatives can still win again. |
| It's
a sobering thought for Republicans to consider seriously. The
conservative base in this country is not necessarily the rich in the big
urban areas. They already got their dreams satisfied, even if they
want more from government because of all the taxes they invest in it.
They aren't as worried as the ordinary Americans, who remain deeply
skeptical of government promises to help them. They've heard it
before, and they already rely on themselves and each other in their
communities to achieve real progress. It's the
less affluent and hard-working base of this country who have the wisdom
to realize that more government spending means more taxes to pay for it,
whether now or someday, just as in their own tight budgets which they
actually have to balance somehow. They worry about having too much
debt.
They know that sooner or later, somebody is going to
have to pay for all this, and it won't just be rich people doing them a
favor through government transfers of wealth. Sooner or later, if
they succeed, it's going to hit them harder and harder, making it more
difficult to realize their own dreams of prosperity. There's no
free lunch. They know it. They work very hard for everything
they have, and for the progress they want to achieve in their own lives.
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It's the affluent leaders in government, from the
local to the state and federal levels, who enjoy spending somebody
else's money as if there were no limits. It's the bureaucrats who
have no motivation to ever cut back on their own budgets. They
always have a good reason why they must spend more. |
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