Yesterday, we had a very interesting discussion about the importance of the electoral college "map" vs. national polling. I quoted Andrew Gelman, who said that "in 2008 the red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing [...] The past several decades have seen a steady decline in the variation of statewide vote swings.[...] To put it another way, the red-blue map is much more stable from election to election than it used to be."
tommypaine, for one, disagreed, saying "Swings are getting far less uniform, not more." Gelman actually agreed that the variance in swing increased from 2000-2004 to 2004-2008. While I can't address at this question with full historical comprehensiveness, I wasn't satisfied with looking state-by-state. States, of course, have large variance in size and internal diversity. Why don't we look by Congressional district? We'll also look at what districts Obama and Kerry "should have" won by uniform national swing, and how the results differed.
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