At Daily Kos Elections, our first passion is, well, elections. But maps are our second great love, and you can’t interpret and understand politics without them. Below we’ve compiled a roundup of several of the best maps that caught our eyes over the last year:
● Clarity Campaigns has produced a lot of fun widgets using their deep database of political information, like how Democratic or Republican your first and last names are, and they also compiled data on what the most liberal and most Republican towns in each state are (based on political orientation questions, not on voter registration or voting patterns).
There's a helpful lesson in here, though, which illustrates the geographic clustering problem that plagues Democrats in the House and in state legislatures. If you look closely at the map, you'll notice that in nearly half the states, the largest city in the state is also the most liberal (the rest tend to be either college towns, or minority enclaves); in other words, the bulk of the state's left-of-center population is concentrated into one place. Pretty much every most conservative place, however, is a hamlet you've probably never heard of. Case in point: Drewsey, Oregon, a wide spot in the middle of the desert, has a population of 18.
● Presidential approvals often swing with gas prices, and Barack Obama’s small rebound earlier this year may have to do with the huge drop in the cost of a gallon of go-juice. It may not be something the president has any great control over, but it's the economic indicator that people see broadcast in foot-high type on every street corner. If you're wondering why that matters, check out this county-level interactive map from Flowing Data about how people get to work. In almost every county in the nation, "drive alone" is by far the most common option.
The few outliers are very interesting: In the New York City metropolitan area, it's public transportation. In much of Alaska (the roadless, mostly Native areas), it's walking, or else "other" (which may mean snow machine, or plane). ("Walk" and "bicycle" also dominate one tiny stray Colorado county, San Juan.) There's also a surprising amount of "work from home" in the Great Plains, especially the Dakotas, which probably means working the family farm.
Then again, Obama’s approvals have dipped once again, despite gas prices doing the same a second time, so the correlation is far from perfect.
● Here's a very cool map from the New York Times' Upshot, delving into the topic of state-to-state migration. This map shows what percentage of each state's population is native-born, compared to the portion that came from each region of the country, as well as those born outside the U.S. The state with the smallest locally born population, you won't be surprised to learn, is Nevada, where just a quarter of the citizenry was born and raised. Florida is second at 36 percent. On the other end of the spectrum, a full 79 percent of Louisianans were born there, followed by Ohio, with 75 percent native-born. You can also dial the map back to see what things looked like in 1900 and 1950.
● You may have seen the epic dot-map that used Census data to show every person in America color-coded by race. Here’s an interesting variation on that: a dot-map that shows almost every job in America, color-coded based on whether it's manufacturing, professional services, governmental, health care, education, or retail or service-sector.
While there's plenty of data available about the numbers and types of jobs at the county or city level, turning the information into spatial form is very helpful. The map drills down to the block level, so you can see precisely where the jobs are, within each metropolitan area. Compared with the crowded dot maps of where people live, most of these cities seem almost empty, with most of the heavy concentrations of jobs in downtowns, along major arterials, and in isolated industrial zones.
The Washington Post's feature on this map gives you an overview of a few major cities, where you can also see which sectors dominate which cities: government in Washington obviously, along with hospitality in Las Vegas, professional services in New York, and, maybe contrary to what you'd expect, manufacturing in Los Angeles.
Have you seen any maps this past year that you’ve enjoyed? Please share them in comments!