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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
During Nixon's time, an anti-Soviet Democrat could easily find a home in the Republican party.
Trying to assign modern labels to the political parties of the 60's and 70's is a bit silly. Two of the biggest issues of the time (the Cold war and segregation) no longer exist today. Neither party has a stated position on the Soviet Union and both parties are radical integrationists.
We could call that a huge leftward shift, except that integration was mostly a right wing issue up until Nixon's "Southern Strategy".
Both parties have "reinvented" themselves multiple times over the years. Arguments could be made on if a young LBJ, JFK, Nixon, Clinton, Lincoln, Bush Sr. would fit into the current version of the party they belonged too.
Plus, much is made of the "radicalism" (ultra conservative / ultra liberal) in each party, as if it hadn't existed before. That's not very true.
My only quibble with the graph is it skips the times that 3rd parties probably cost someone the election (1992/2000 are probables) which means the states were actually leaning the other way.
> 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.
The Reagan claim is nuts. By the logic of those links, Bill Clinton was too conservative to be nominated by today's Democratic party because he was for free trade, signed DoMA, passed welfare reform and substantially cut the growth of discretionary spending... sorry: "investment".
At least two of the GOP's nominees since Reagan would have been happy to sign more immigration liberalization. Bush the Elder raised taxes. Bush the Younger failed to cut spending just like Reagan, and added a new prescription drug entitlement to Medicare. McCain was instrumental in passing campaign finance reform, and Romney passed an individual mandate and state run health exchanges.
Reagan "too liberal"? That's a fairy tale. Dead conservatives were always the moderate ones.
>By the logic of those links, Bill Clinton was too conservative to be nominated by today's Democratic party
No, only by the illogic of false equivalence. Obama is for "free" trade, directly said multiple times that he was against gay marriage until recently, is running on a platform to cut Social Security, and has cut a massive number of government jobs during a time of high unemployment. In other words, Bill Clinton is conservative enough to be nominated by today's Democratic party. Reagan was far too liberal to be nominated by today's Republican party.
"Government jobs". There are fewer total people employed in government, because the states have been put through the ringer and the stimulus contained no state aid (price of getting the Maine senators on board).
Anwyays, you're smart enough to know that flatlining is effectively a cut, relative to population and inflation. Certainly relative to every other recent president, Reagan and Bush very much included. And relative to Romney's plan to increase military spending (guess how many of those 2.8M are military or homeland security employees).
Actually no, there are fewer people employed in government because state and local governments chose to raise employee pay while cutting the number of workers.
Again, you're smart enough to know what 'normal' is. 'Normal' is cost of living raises, continued employer provided healthcare (which goes up in price every year), and ~~5% cost inflation for any organization that employs people. States have been cutting relative to that.
The crappy part is that a huge % of the rollover cost is healthcare, so it's not even going to their employees.
According to Keynesian theories of economics, recessions are the product of sticky nominal wages combined with an exogenous shock.
Real wages need to go down in order for the recession to end, which is why inflation is promoted as the cure. Wages are sticky downwards, there is no reason to raise them, particularly for monopsony employers.
Sure. But healthcare is most likely driving their comp costs more than pocket wages. Healthcare is what's driving state/local government costs because of the high head count of middle class professions. Salaries might go up by 2-4% depending on the collective bargaining agreement with the union, healthcare will go up by 15%.
Basically, states and local governments aren't operating with a macro worldview of the whole economy, they're trying to balance their own budget. They're going to eat it on healthcare, pay as small a COL raise as they can get the public employee unions to accept (pretty small actually), and lay off employees on the stupid last-in-first-out basis that the unions insist on. Decision makers at the state level are just trying to get through the year.
The funny thing is that a liberal can look at those ballooning healthcare costs (biggest $ item in the deltas year-over-year) and see it as a private sector screwup, while a conservative can look at the total costs going up and see it as public bloat.
* because he was for free trade, signed DoMA, passed welfare reform and substantially cut the growth of discretionary spending*
Obama's actually for all of those except for DoMa, and it took him until this year to finally come out in support of gay marriage. Obama has signed free trade agreements, cut the growth of discretionary spending, and hasn't attempted to touch Clinton's welfare reform (aside from granting states waivers that republican governors had been asking for).
That's my point. The two big political parties nominate candidates within the broad consensus of American politics, for the most part. Or at least the candidates that get elected have to govern largely along that consensus in order to get anything done. Remember, then-Senator Obama campaigned on "renegotiating NAFTA" and generally called it a bad deal for the American worker. He was also "not a big fan" of welfare reform. But as you say, he hasn't done much about either.
It's silly to claim that a modern Reagan wouldn't fit well enough within the Republican and American mainstreams to be nominated, and those links don't provide real evidence otherwise. Shocking: Reagan wasn't a hard and fast ideologue. But a hard and fast ideologue isn't going to be nominated by the Republican party today, either.
Did you spring into existence sometime after the last debate? Romney isn't a hard and fast ideologue because he isn't a hard and fast anything. But he certainly had to make those noises to be nominated.
Reagan's positions and what he did in office are completely incompatible with Republicans today. A budget deal with democrats that raises taxes? Tough love on Israel occasionally?
I'm not saying Reagan wouldn't have been able to be elected, but he'd have to be a different Reagan to get the nomination. A hard and fast ideologue or, in the worst case, someone who makes the appropriate noises and can beat Newt Gingrich.
I'll argue that the country is in many ways further to the right than it was then. I think today, even many Democrats are too brow-beaten to mention the EPA, OSHA, Title IX, ending wars, etc. Something like the ERA would be politically untouchable today for a Democrat much less a Republican. Not just among politicians, but among regular people.
Depends on what you mean by “further to the right”.
From WW2 to the early 1970s, there was a two-party consensus on government intervention in the economy, and that consensus moved “right” even before Reagan. (One of Carter’s legislative accomplishments, for example, was deregulating airline fares.)
On the other hand, the country has moved “left” on social issues. Can you imagine any politician in 1975, outside of the most extremely liberal districts, saying that same-sex couples should have legal protections equivalent to those of a married couple? And now that seems to be the “safe” position for right-wing Democrats and left-wing Republicans to take. The ERA hasn’t passed, but the courts have been more critical of laws that have a disparate impact on men and women (the technical term is “intermediate scrutiny”).
Regarding protracted military interventions in foreign countries, the parties seem to have moved “left” in the aftermath of Vietnam and “right” again with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Yeah, I know cities tend to vote liberal, but DC has always seemed extreme to me, even accounting for that. I mean, I don't have data for how big cities vote in general, but I thought it was something like 70% liberal. A solid majority and dissenters.
But DC voted 93% Democrat in 2008. 93! That's not a majority. That's a consensus.
It's on the high end, but I think around 80-90% Democratic for an urban core is fairly common. It's hard to get exact numbers because it depends on where lines are drawn. For example, Cook County (where Chicago is located) "only" voted 76% Obama, but it includes a number of suburban areas, and would be >80% if you pruned them.
Here are the next-most-Democratic cities I came across in some spot-checking, with NYC boroughs broken out b/c they're separate counties: 89% Bronx (NYC), 86% Manhattan (NYC), 84% San Francisco, 80% Brooklyn (NYC), 79% Boston, 79% Alameda County (East Bay), 77% Portland.
Silicon Valley is closer to the 70-ish you're thinking of, but it includes a number of quite suburban areas. Obama won 74% in San Mateo County, and 70% in San Jose County. LA County is about the same (70%), as is Fulton County (Atlanta).
Sorry, I guess we're a bit overly fussy out here. That one would be Los Angeles County. (Not that you couldn't call it LA County, just doesn't sound quite right. It's not uncommon to abbreviate the city to LA, but not so much the county.)
I don't think that's true of the past decade or so. While DC's outlying suburbs in Virginia and Maryland are more Republican than the urban core, they most certainly vote more Democratic than the average suburban county elsewhere in the U.S.
It's been as high as 71.1% Black (in 1970). The percentage has been decreasing as Blacks have moved to the suburbs and Hispanics have moved into the city.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 . Some more hacking is needed.
This isn't a political statement, just that hackers should investigate how to hack the system into that form.
Haha...I love this.
The only way to do government is full-blown communism, with a little genocide mixed in for good measure. This isn't a political statement, but someone should figure out how to make this happen.
A "parliamentary system" means a system where legislative elections are held and the party or coalition of parties that garners a majority then forms the executive branch of the government, and one member of the legislature is chosen to serve as the "prime minister" or head of the executive branch.
Americans would never accept a system that did not allow them to select their chief executives (presidents, governors, mayors).
Why? If you want PR, you can have that with a presidential system. See Brazil as an example. Americans have had presidential systems since before the country was founded (the colonial governments), have enjoyed virtually unparalleled stability with them, and show no eagerness to abandon them.
In fact, the UK, one of the oldest parliamentary democracies in the world and the originator of the "Westminster System" used in most Anglophone countries, moved towards presidentialism with the Local Government Act 2003 that allowed directly-elected mayors, such as London's colorful Boris Johnson.
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.
> Why do people love to act like both parties are the same? Is it just errant, broad pessimism?
On the contrary, it's not necessarily pessimism, the people who feel that way are probably just rather focused on the issues where the candidates are depressingly similar. For example if you want to see military spending massively reduced, the financial system reformed in fundamental ways to reduce systemic risk, or massively increased gasoline taxes to cover infrastructure improvements or green energy development, you probably feel badly served by both parties and their candidates right now.
On the other hand, if you're a gay man who wants to get married and start a family, or a redneck who wants to be able to carry your .357 magnum wherever you want whenever you want, or a rich guy who wants to keep your taxes as close to zero as can be achieved under the current two party system, the party differences are rather more obvious to you.
It's not really a question of pessimism, just the way people prioritize things. A person who has a lot of strong interests in the first category of issues (where the parties are rather similar, or just similarly useless) might be a lot more likely to say the parties are the same than a person whose strong interests are in the other set of issues.
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"
I've come to see people saying that as "they are the same in areas I particularly care about." Now, what those similar areas are, is usually the same. Corporate influence. (Usually, anyway. It can change.)
The importance of those similar areas to other people is unaddressed in this concern. Key is that the opinion holder see this as a larger issue in their, or everyone's lives, even if others (you, me, anyone) may disagree.
The big risk isn't 3rd parties, it's just not voting, as about half of our citizens decide to do. And for example, it's hard to see the Republican party try to capture undecided voters with more centrist policies without pissing off the right-wing portion of their party, who won't go vote for the green party, but will instead:
1) Not vote
2) Start something like the Tea Party
3) Toss the incumbents out because they weren't extreme enough
This is happening on the left as well; we're becoming way more partisan as a country, and slowly but surely removing all the moderates from Congress.
Half is optimistic. In non-presidential year congressional elections it's not uncommon to have less than 1 in 3 voting. In true off-year elections in odd years where most folks are voting on lower court judges (in my state, anyway), local representatives on councils and school boards, it's much closer to 1 in 5 or less.
There are just over 600 people in my ward of my township. 67 people voted in 2011 for the Council seat that was up. It's disgusting.
I would posit that the cause is somewhat different, though: the partisan zealots are the ones that vote in every single primary and general election. For those of you who vote for POTUS and that's all, there are actually two elections every year. The country as a whole I think is more moderate than 99% of our elected officials, but the country as a whole isn't voting. It's largely straight-ticket people voting, especially in off years. This results in Members of Congress becoming more extreme because those are the people voting for them.
The GP didn't say that they're the same, just that they're in the hands of corporations. Now that may or may not be true, but I think it's obvious that a two party state is very sub-optimal.
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.
Quite frankly, that's bullshit. Romney/Ryan advocate a rollback of my rights and continued (or furthered) discrimination against me. That's only one small social issue that they differ on and they differ on policies that involve much more substantive issues.
Maybe you're privileged or fortunate enough to not be affected by tax rates, women's rights legislation, gay rights issues, and more, but many of us aren't. Those issues matter and that's why some support Romney and some support Obama.
It's really frustrating to see how often they're described as the same thing. Whenever there's just one (or a couple of) issues that diverge from someone's personal opinion, they completely disregard all of the differences. I can accept that there's a lot of grey area in politics. That doesn't completely shroud the very distinct differences there would be between a Romney and Obama administration.
What rights did you gain under the Obama administration that you would lose under a Romney administration? How would Romney discriminate against you in a way that Obama would not?
I wouldn't consider those really substantive compared to drawback of the military-industrial complex, radical increase in nasa/science funding, full free national health-care (including dentistry), overhaul of the education system (along the lines advocated by khan academy), ending the drug war, ending corporate welfare (and maybe even corporate personhood), and probably other major ones I can't think of right now.
Those issues affect me every, single day in a tangible primary fashion. The other problems, yes, are frustrating. Romney and Obama differ on how the feel towards funding that military industrial complex, and in a telling way given what you're discussing and the nature of the industrial complex.
As for national health-care, education, science, etc, they very noticeably and very starkly differ as well.
... I feel like you just supported what I was saying. My second post was simply an example of how they differ in meaningful ways.
This is not an either/or discussion. I see what you mean, that there is a very tangible difference between the current two candidates. On the other hand, two is a very limited choice. A lot of first world countries have multi-party systems and have some form of social democracy. Perhaps if it weren't for the first-past-the-post electoral system, the US might be a social democracy as well.
http://bost.ocks.org/mike/
Most of the code is open source, too:
https://github.com/mbostock
Awesome that he's working at the NYT alongside people like Nate Silver.