Post-election stats wonkery

I'm a big nerd. So here are some stats I found interesting relating to the election:

The most Democratic county in the nation was Prince George's County, Maryland. Fully 89.1% of the vote in PG went to Obama, beating even the 88.7% of Shannon County, South Dakota, which was the most Democratic county in the nation in the 2004 election. (92.9% of the District of Columbia voted for Obama, but that's not really a county since it's not a segment of a state.)

The only state without a Democratic county was Oklahoma. The New York Times, where I got the stats, doesn't have county-by-county breakdowns for Alaska, but among the lower 48 and Hawaii, only Oklahoma didn't have a single county turn blue. By contrast, six states - Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire - didn't have any red counties.

The county map still shows mostly red, but that doesn't matter. After the 2004 election, I recall seeing a map showing how most of the counties in America were red and how this was somehow proof that the Republicans were dominating the country. While a look at the '92 and '96 electoral county maps does show that many more counties are red now than were red even just 12 years ago, it's kind of important to know which counties are red. And the fact is that most populous counties went to Obama. Of the 49 states for which the Times has county results, Obama won the most populous county in 40 of them, and often by huge margins: he won Los Angeles County by 40.5%, Denver County by 52.1%, Cook County by 53.2%, Orleans Parish by 60.1%, Kings County (Brooklyn) by 58.7%, and Philadelphia County by 66.7%. All told, of his 40, Obama won 25 of them by at least 20 points. McCain's nine were the biggest counties in Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming; only two of them he won by more than 20 points (Greenville County, SC and Laramie County, WY). Even in some of the states that Obama lost, he won the biggest counties by sizable margins, including Orleans in Louisiana; Hinds County, MS (which he won by more than 40 points); Shelby County, TN (27.6 points); St. Louis County, MO (almost 20 points); and Fulton County, GA (35 points).

What's more, of the 50 most populous counties in the entire country (which, oddly, is the same as the list of counties with 900,000 people or more), Obama won 46. The only four he didn't? Maricopa County, AZ (home to McCain's base of Phoenix), Orange County, CA (rich people), Tarrant County, TX, and Salt Lake County, UT (reliably Republican Mormons, although McCain won this county with less than 50% of the vote and by just 0.5 points). Obama also won many of the 46 quite handily, taking at least 60% of the vote in 25 of the 46 and more than 70% of the vote in ten of them. Even in McCain's most commanding win of his four, Tarrant County, he took just 55.6% of the vote.

And even besides that, Obama's most motivated counties were more populous than McCain's in most states. In fact, the county that gave Obama the highest percentage of its vote among the counties in its state was often the largest or one of the few largest in its state (this includes Cook in IL, Wayne in MI, Philadelphia in PA, Bronx in NY, Suffolk in MA, San Francisco in CA, Multnomah in OR, King in WA, Ramsey in MN, Essex in NJ, Cuyahoga in OH, and Shelby in TN), whereas McCain's most motivated supporters were usually found in more rural and/or less populated counties. In only seven states was McCain's most motivated county more populous than Obama's, and only in Hawaii - where the most "staunchly" McCain county, Honolulu, gave him a full 29% of the vote - was the county that gave its biggest percentage of the vote to McCain the biggest county in its state.

The greatest percentage of votes in one county was 93.2%, going to McCain in King County, Texas. I love this one mostly because of how few voters there were in King County (the third-smallest county by population in the US). 151 people voted for McCain, and eight voted for Obama. Eight??? I love it. Who are these eight people and why do they live there?

Nearly every state got more Democratic. Indiana went from +21 GOP to +1 for the Democrats, amazingly. And it's not just the ones that switched - already blue states got bluer. California, for example, went from +10 for Kerry in 2004 to +24 for Obama. Hawaii went from +9 for Kerry to +45 for Obama. Even Kerry's home state of Massachusetts went from +25 to +26. The only states that got redder? Arkansas (+10 to +20), Louisiana (+15 to +19), and Tennessee (+14 to +15). Oklahoma and West Virginia stayed the same.

Obama got 52.6% of the popular vote. It's the most of any candidate since Bush I in 1988, and the most for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, also the last time the Democrats won Indiana and Virginia. Of course, this part you probably already knew. I bring it up more to point out how hilarious it is that conservatives have jumped right on the "This isn't a mandate for the Democrats" wagon. This is the same party that bragged about Bush's "political capital" after he won 2% less of the popular vote and almost 80 fewer electoral votes than Obama got this year. (In case you didn't buy that the results of the election aren't a mandate for Obama, some conservatives have started to argue that he's "center-right" and that his policies resemble Dwight Eisenhower's. Anything to avoid the fact that this election was an absolute destruction of the Republican party.)

January 20 can't come soon enough.