
FiveThirtyEight: Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted - andres
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/15/us/politics/swing-history.html?hp
======
dewitt
Mike Bostock of D3 fame is basically unrivaled in data visualization using
HTML, SVG, and JS:

<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.

~~~
kevinnk
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.

~~~
EvanMiller
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...](http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968&f=0&off=0&elect=0)

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
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.

------
mbell
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
> 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...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/05/10/even-reagan-wasn-
t-a-reagan-republican.html)

[http://www.quora.com/Politics/Would-Ronald-Reagan-not-be-
con...](http://www.quora.com/Politics/Would-Ronald-Reagan-not-be-conservative-
enough-for-todays-Republican-party)

~~~
twoodfin
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.

~~~
pessimizer
>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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_is running on a platform to cut Social Security,_

Citation needed.

 _and has cut a massive number of government jobs during a time of high
unemployment._

As of Jan 2009, there were 2,790,000 federal employees. There are now
2,814,000.

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/CES9091000001.txt>

Maybe you mean he didn't increase the number of government jobs as fast as was
projected?

~~~
jbooth
"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).

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIGVTWAG>

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES9092000001>

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES9093000001>

~~~
jbooth
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

~~~
jbooth
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.

------
Dove
I am always astonished by what an outlier DC is.

~~~
netmau5
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.

~~~
grecy
> DC has the highest ghetto per capita in the world.

Do you have a source for that?

~~~
bmm6o
Of course he doesn't, the claim barely makes sense.

------
ww520
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
Population boom in the urban areas of LA, SF, etc.

~~~
jcampbell1
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.

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

------
dmix
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
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.

------
btilly
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
I wish we could click on a state and it would stay highlighted. That would be
much easier, in my opinion.

~~~
bcuccioli
In the left margin there's a button to make New Jersey and California stay
highlighted. Right click -> inspect element -> and go from there :)

------
pserwylo
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
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>

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
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
In any other country, the American left/right spectrum would not make sense.

------
driverdan
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.

------
marshallp
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.

~~~
drivebyacct2
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.

~~~
colanderman
If they weren't similar, then it would behoove them to become more so, lest
the other party move to sway undecided voters.

Plurality voting ensures that there are two major parties, and that they are
as similar as possible without ceding ground to third parties.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
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.

~~~
pc86
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.

~~~
antoko
I'm not sure how much of this is actually due to voter apathy. Whilst I agree
with promoting civic engagement it may not directly address this issue.

The reason the country is becoming more partisan is more likely due to the
benefits of incumbency, and the insane level of gerrymandering we allow.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#United_States>

