had a conventional wisdom cover article about how out-of-touch the city folk are from the real people of the country, based on the same faulty mathematics and map-reading that have characterized similar coverage. My response:
What Walsh and Mapes seem not to realize is that the state average includes Multnomah County. An average is the middle ground of a set of numbers. For every outlying data point in an averaged set (Multnomah County for the Democrats), there has to be some sort of balance. While it's true that Multnomah is the only county in the state where the vote is so lopsidedly Democratic, much of Eastern Oregon is just as out-of-whack with the average as Multnomah — just the other direction. Baker, Crook, Grant, Harney, Klamath, Lake, Malheur, Wallowa, and Wheeler counties all voted for George W. Bush at rates more than 20% of the state average this year. All but two of those counties did so at rates higher than the 21% deviation from average they claim separates Multnomah County from the rest of the state. Grant County, where over 78% of the voters chose Bush (according to state figures available Sunday morning), is over 30 percentage points off the statewide tallies of Bush voters, making them the most out-of-touch county in the state, if you accept the terms of the article. Not only was their vote far off the state average, but according to the majority of Oregonians, they chose the wrong candidate.
There have been a number of official-looking graphs from news organizations in the past few days showing "a pattern of heavily Democratic cities surrounded by a sea of pro-Bush voters" in this election. Most of those graphs are organized by county. At first glance, they appear somewhat intimidating for Democrats. And it might indeed be scary if acreage — rather than people — voted.
I've provided a couple of charts of my own, which show the deviation from both state and national averages in this election. There is a disparity from the norm in Multnomah County. But there's an equally wide deviation in most of the counties on the other side of the Cascades. In fact, the only counties where the vote was within a couple of percentage points of the state average were Columbia and Washington.
open interactive chart in a separate window
I'm surprised that a 1,300-word article managed to get to print without someone realizing that if Multnomah County's numbers are far off in one direction that there has to be something of equal size on the other side of the average pulling the other way. It took me all of about 10 seconds to see the problem in the article's argument, and I haven't taken a math class for over twenty years. Perhaps it's time, though, for the Oregonian to send a few of its reporters and editors to some remedial math courses.
The article points out that without Multnomah County, Bush would have won the state by 80,000 votes. It's no real surprise that if you eliminate a fifth of the electorate, the results of the vote might change. Multnomah County accounted for 343,290 of the 1,754,873 votes in the state, just over 19.5% of the voters in the presidential race. Ignoring a similarly-sized number of ballots from the counties with the highest percentage of Bush voters would eliminate the counts of 19 counties (the nine mentioned above plus Curry, Douglas, Gilliam, Jefferson, Josephine, Linn, Morrow, Sherman, Umatilla, and Union counties), 288,434 voters — only 16.5% of the total, and would have given Kerry a victory margin of 161,341 votes, over two-and-a-half times the actual statewide result. Eliminating Multnomah County from that scenario so that the counties containing the fifth of the votes most skewed toward each candidate aren't counted still gives Kerry a slim margin of 8,827. To someone with even a layman's understanding of mathematics, it's really no surprise that as you eliminate data that deviates from both sides of the norm, the numbers tend toward the norm.
I'm looking forward to Walsh and Mapes's follow-up article, showing how Eastern Oregon is drifting away from the state and nation because of a more pronounced shift away from the Oregon norm than they found in Multnomah County.