The Electoral Map

They used to say that so goes Delaware goes the nation. Well, I’ve never heard that exact saying, but the First State voted for the winning presidential candidate from 1952 to 1996.
It was always a swing state because Delaware, despite what Wayne and Garth said, had a little something of everything — a Northeastern-style [...]

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I came across a great mapping device today called “US Demographics Visualizer” that’s produced by a company called idvsolutions.  What they do is take Microsoft Virtual Earth software and then layer five measures of demographics over it: population, age, ethnicity, political and income.  So, to give you an example, I took a screen shot of [...]

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Politico‘s Jonathan Martin raises a great question: “Are east-coast pols not getting how bad the fires are? Any candidates in SoCal this week?”
On one hand, this is a major disaster and the most dominant story in this news cycle. On the other hand, it could be seen as opportunistic and getting in the way. [...]

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NBC/National Journal’s Mike Memoli makes a great point about the Red Sox effect in New Hampshire: It’ll almost be pointless for the presidential candidates to campaign in the state while the Sox are in the World Series. News cycles for a couple of weeks will be dominated by the Sox, and politics will likely take [...]

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Slate has a new feature called “Map the Candidates.” It looks like they just track where the candidates are going, and then plug the towns into Google Maps. You can also select which candidates are on the map, and you can adjust the time parameters.
It’s an interesting, useful feature, but it looks a [...]

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Put a fork in the Louisiana Democratic coalition. Rep. Bobby Jindal’s (R) historic 54 percent victory on Saturday might seem like the triumph of a gifted legislator, or a repudiation of Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s (D) tenure, but the truth is that his accession marks the end of an era. The fragile Democratic coalition of [...]

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Ron Paul Graphs Blog has a follow-up on Patrick Ruffini’s post about the geography of Ron Paul donors. They have two great maps: one showing donations per capita in the last 24 hours and one showing donations per capita in Q4. However, Ron Paul Graphs blog notes:
“These numbers ARE NOT comprehensive (not [...]

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Patrick Ruffini put together a map showing where Ron Paul is getting his donations from. What did he find?
“This really is a Western movement, with some of the Northeast thrown in. Basically, these are the places where you would expect libertarians to be strong. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a data set [...]

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In a Wall Street Journal column today, John Fund lays out his argument against gerrymandering:
“Gerrymandering — the drawing of district lines to favor a particular party, or incumbents in general — allows lawmakers to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. Almost all incumbents routinely win re-election and form a political [...]

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“Confidential. Gentlemen of the Senate and of the House of Representatives: The River Missouri and the Indians inhabiting it are not as well known as is desirable. An intelligent officer with 10 or 12 chosen men might explore the whole line, even to the Western Ocean. The appropriation of $2,500 would cover the undertaking.”
– [...]

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