Election Maps: Ferndale Edition

 

I learn visually and so to learn about my own community, I graph how people vote.  Just a few quick thoughts here about what the 2016 presidential primary tell us about my part of southeastern Oakland county.

 

First, wealthier citizens vote.  I don’t have the census tract stats on income or education immediately at hand, but these green spaces correlate quite closely with the education-income corridor that intensifies as Woodward heads north.  This relationship is quite linear and self explanatory.ferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_1Partisanship shows different patterns but they are similarly strong:  Republicans in this area are concentrated in the north and east, but it is important (as we can see later) that these are different kinds of Republicans.  And even the highest level of concentration of Republicans in this district is still no more than 1/3.  Democrats concentrate in south-central Ferndale and then even more in the precincts to the West in Oak Park and Royal Oak Township.

 

ferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_2

Within the Democratic vote, the concentrated areas of Democrats in Ferndale are rather different from the concentrated areas of Democrats in Oak Park and Royal Oak Township.  Ferndale’s Democratic areas are also its Sanders Zones, with 2:1 Sanders voters.  The Clinton Zones are in the west, in Oak Park and Royal Oak Township with a nearly 3:1 advantage for Clinton.ferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_7ferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_4

The result is that even though Royal Oak Township and Oak Park are rich with Democratic voters, they are still among the poorest areas for Sanders, even worse than some of the not-that-Democratic areas in Ferndale’s north and east..ferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_3

On the Republican side, the battle lines are not quite as easy to draw, but I’ll start with a simple binary opposition between the candidates that the Republican Party establishment fear (Trump, and in a different way, Cruz) and those who have received more establishment endorsements and support (Rubio and Kasich).  The patterns here are not quite as clear, but what stands out is that the more heavily Republican areas within Ferndale and Pleasant Ridge are actually quite different:  As the map above shows, there are more Republicans than average in a semicircle arcing from the top center of the map (Pleasant Ridge) to the lower-right/southeast.  But this semicircle is intensely split between Pleasant Ridge, which voted Kasich/Rubio 2:1 over Trump/Cruz, to southeast Ferndale which voted for Trump/Cruz by precisely the same ratio.

ferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_8

In specific terms of support for Trump, we see his support concentrated in Ferndale’s northeast (with a share of Republican voters for Trump that is slightly above the statewide average) and also in Ferndale’s southwest i precinct 2.  But this latter phenomenon is at least in part a question of the precinct’s relatively small number of Republican votersferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_6

Looking at the map overall, we can see that the combination of high Republican support and high Trump support makes northeast Ferndale Trump’s core..  This is Sanders’ weakest precinct in Ferndale but not Clinton’s, so the battle there (if both get the nomination) will be one worth watching.

ferndale election maps 2016 primaries_Page_5

Source: http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/MI/Oakland/59377/163183/en/summary.html

 

Slovakia Election 2016 at halftime

Later than usual and weirder than usual, Slovakia’s election results are starting to take definite shape.  And what a shape.

First, I have to apologize to the Exit Poll team at FOCUS for doubting them.  The results they found were so far from the February polls that I simply couldn’t believe them.  And yet the results are not at the moment very far off.  The ranking is essentially the same and the degree of difference is so far not much different from in 2012.  So congratulations to FOCUS and shame on me for believing it (As Groucho Marx would say, “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”)

 

Slovakia Election 2016 Liveblogging

Trying to do a little bit of live blogging tonight (and also commenting here, albeit in Slovak, http://domov.sme.sk/c/20110328/osobnosti-o-volbach-nazivo.html)

Exit polls from FOCUS are surprising at a minimum.  I’m having a hard time knowing what to do with them.  I’ve got some methods for adjusting exit poll results but these don’t even look like the polls so I don’t know what to do with them.

We’ll now have a better idea once the first 200 or so precincts submit votes.  Until then, we’re playing the same game as sports commentators, only for politics:

 

 

https://xkcd.com/904/