In his prediction post at FiveThirtyEight.com yesterday, poblano predicted that John Edwards would win a greater amount of the vote in West Virginia because of a specific ballot quirk:  the candidates' hometowns were listed on the ballot.  The prediction was predicated on the idea the some undecided or weakly leaning voters may be swayed by seeing "Chapel Hill, NC" next to "Chicago, IL" and "Chappaqua, NY".

And this prediction turned out to be correct.  John Edwards had the strongest performance that he's had since February 5, when he won 10.2% of the vote in Oklahoma despite suspending his campaign earlier that week.  This time he pulled an impressive 7.3% of the vote three months after suspending his campaign.

Because of this, West Virginia stands out in the map of Edwards' vote percentage compared to the surrounding states:

As promised, here are the maps from the Democratic primary.  Like the commentary I did for the Republican race, this may be a little long and I apologize in advance for that.  If you don't want to read everything, you can scroll through the maps and read the text near the ones you find interesting.

All the color maps here will follow this scale (with some caveats):

In the featured maps, red represents Clinton votes, green represents Edwards votes, and blue represents Obama votes.  The caveat is that many counties are actually slightly darker than anything on this scale because of other votes (Biden, Richardson, Uncommitted, etc.).

To start, here's the map of the primaries so far, updated to include Indiana and North Carolina:

This year's primary season has been an interesting one to say the least.  The media narrative that the Republicans lack a strong candidate while we Democrats have an "inevitable" candidate in Senator Clinton has been turned on its head with the quick rise of Senator McCain after January and the nearly deadlocked race between Senators Obama and Clinton.

As we head into another pair of primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, I thought it would be interesting to look back, but this time at the Republican race, now that it's essentially over.  Though it was a much less exciting race for us, it still shows some interesting trends, so I've put together some maps showing the progress of the Republican race for the presidential nomination.

If you're wondering why I don't yet have something similar up for the Democratic race, don't fret!  I hope to put up something similar this Wednesday or Thursday, after we can take stock of the North Carolina and Indiana results.  I'll also offer some comparison with the Republicans then.

Yesterday, I released an updated map of the Democratic primary and Seneca Doane pointed to this diary from March in which she (Seneca, please tell me if I guessed the right gender) advocates using white as a neutral color in place of purple for reasons of contrast:  people are better able to distinguish between tints of a color than shade of purple.  This is a fair criticism.  Shades of purple are harder to distinguish than equivalently different tints of a single color.

However, I do think that Seneca overstated the difference in her diary and I also think there are other trade-offs that don't make it a clear cut choice.  In this diary, I am going to use a single color scheme for my primary map and that is that Obama is represented by the color blue, Clinton is represented by the color red and Edwards is represented by the color green.

Now that Pennsylvania has voted, it's time to release an update to the primary map.  This time, I don't have many variants, because I decided to switch to a different template for my map, using an SVG graphic as the original template, which can be better resized and allowed me to do away with the boundaries which obscure some of the trends between states.

I think it's pretty clear that Pennsylvania voted in a similar fashion to the surrounding states and that it adds even more clarity to the future contests.

Larger versions of the maps are available on Flickr (just click on the image to get to its Flickr page).  In the above version, blue represent Obama, red represents Clinton, and green represents Edwards.  If you don't like these colors, there are color swapped versions below the fold.

According to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic, Adam Parkhomenko, a ex-Clinton staffer in his early 20's who resigned from her campaign three weeks ago, started the website voteboth.com, which promotes the idea of a "unity ticket" or "dream ticket", with of course, Hillary Clinton at the top and Barack Obama as VP.

Now, this is not his first stint at pro-Hillary agitating through website creation.  He apparently created the website votehillary.org in 2003 and started a Draft Hillary for President 2004.  So, this young man has pretty much devoted a large portion of his politically active career pushing for Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy.

In the past few weeks, with no primaries since Mississippi and almost a month until Pennsylvania, the focus of the campaign has been off the horse race and onto campaign bickering through comments made by surrogates, candidates, and their associates as the media attempts to boost ratings by drumming up outrage.

As there have been no new contests, I haven't been able to add any state results to my map of the primaries so far, but that doesn't mean I haven't been able to make some major changes.

Larger versions of all maps in this diary are available by clicking on the map.  The small maps are color swapped versions of the large map above them.  Color swapped versions of the above map and many more are past the jump

"Respect, Empower, Include." -internal Obama campaign slogan

As you may know, the Iowa Democrats held their county conventions yesterday and the result was a big bonus for Senator Obama in the projected delegate count, changing the media projection of Obama 16, Clinton 15, Edwards 14 to Obama 25, Clinton 14, Edwards 6.

It should be noted, however, that like the previous projection, this one is not permanent.  It may be closer to the final count, but like the previous projection, it depends upon delegates showing up and staying by their current choice.  I have long been saying that Edwards's 14 Iowa delegates had not materialized yet, and truly, the same is true about the current 6.  The process is far from over.  It will continue through the April 26 district conventions and the June 14 state convention.

As promised, I have updated my map of the primary results by county so far.  The most obvious update is that Mississipi's results are included.  

As well, I used the Vermont Secretary of State data to find the actual Edwards vote there, correcting an estimation I had made earlier.  Like the update of California for the post-Wyoming update, this is not noticeable.

The third update is, as promised, a more detailed look at North Dakota.  

Swapped colors and further explanations after the break

(Here are some really cool maps posted Saturday that are deserving of a wider viewing. Promoted from the diaries. SusanG.)

Since Wyoming doesn't have many counties, this wasn't exactly a big update.  I did modify the coloration of California based on the certified results, which were mostly better for Obama so many of the counties are imperceptibly bluer, though I'm serious when I say imperceptibly.

One thing that I thought was interesting was how well Clinton did toward the southeastern side of Wyoming.  Looking at the pattern, South Dakota may be a bit closer that originally expected.  I will try to figure out the state Congressional districts in North Dakota so that the next update will better show the trends.

Now, I do know that the contests in Michigan and Florida are worth 0 delegates, and I very much agree with the DNC's decision because of the disruptive nature of having two huge states voting early (I'm an Iowan, what can I say?).  However, I do think that the trends in both states are interesting, so I have included the results.  I figure that those looking at the maps already know about the situation, but if people want a version where Florida and Michigan are blackened to signify that no legitimate vote has occured, then I will include a version with that modification in the Post-Mississipi version.

Update:  I will note that the way to look at Michigan is to note how dark the counties are.  The darker they are, the more people voted for Uncomitted (or Kucinich, Dodd, or Gravel).  Many counties in Tennessee are "redder" than any of the counties in Michigan.

Also, if you want bigger versions, just click on the maps and go to the large size on Flickr.

On further note.  I mentioned this in a previous diary with a previous version of this map.  The size of these counties is proportional to their geographic size, not their population or voter turnout size, so there is some skew in how the red or blue some areas look.  One thing to note is that Obama does much better in urban areas.  Look at Nebraska.  There are three congressional districts (that was the most detailed data I could find), which theoretically have the same population, but have vastly different sizes because of the population density difference between Omaha and different areas of the state.  Furthermore, even there, a pro-Obama state which is overrepresented in geographic area, the rural areas were more pro-Clinton than the urban areas.

Tennessee is another example.  Obviously Clinton won that state, but obviously not by as much as the map seems to indicate.  You can actually tell where major cities are by how blue they are against the very strongly red rural regions of Tennessee.

Two weeks ago, I posted a "purple" map of the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries in a my first diary, saying that I would post an updated map after the March 4 primaries.

I've added the results from Vermont, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas, as well as recoloring the Hawaii results by county instead of congressional district (thanks Erick for the more detailed results link).  I will also note that the Texas results displayed here are the primary results, not the caucus, which was more in Obama's favor.  I chose to use just the primary results for a few reasons, the main ones being that the caucus results aren't all in yet (the vast majority of the primary results are) and there's no easy way to add the two results together as there were different turnout levels, different weighting, etc. for those two processes

I thought that this was pretty common knowledge, especially after the result of the 2000 election, but given some of the sentiments flying about recently and diaries like this, I thought that a diary explaining why it would be ridiculous for Hillary Clinton to run as an independent and why it would not be a good idea to vote for Nader unless you honestly had no preference between the two candidates put forth by the Republican and Democratic Parties.

After the 2004 presidential election, Robert J. Vanderbrei at Princeton released a map of the United States showing the relative strengths of Bush and Kerry's voting base by county which he called Purple America.  The map gave a better sense of exactly where the candidates did well and helped dispell the illusion that states were either completely red or completely blue that was created by the coloring of whole states by their winners.

As of now, the site has several maps, including several that attempt to show population by raising those areas, as well as maps from 2000, from the 2005 NJ gubernatorial election, the 2006 Congressional election, and a few maps of the Democrat-Republican balance in these 2008 primaries so far.

It is in that spirit that I created this map of the Democratic primary so far: