NY-29: Massa performance by county demographics (w/pretty graphs)
Following up on my earlier post showing general performance change 04 to 06, I took a look at key demographics from Census.gov. Yes, I’m a geek. No, I don’t have too much time on my hands. It’s critical in understanding what the heck’s going on in the 29th, so, blog I must. A life unexamined is not worth the living, and a congressional district unexamined is not worth the blogging. (Or something…)
A couple notes before we dig in– the Monroe county stats are for ALL Monroe, not just the 29th’s portion of it. So it’ll do things like depress Monroe county income figures and education level a little, but not enough, IMO, to affect getting a good picture of how things correlate (or don’t). nequals1 is more than welcome to bring his Death Star Planet Killer-esque stats knowledge to bear on this and break it up into little chunks of worthless rock. It’s all in the name of science, after all.
What I did was to take Massa’s % of the vote in each of the counties, and try to correlate it with each key demographic. Because RT has no money (email us if you want to contribute to a stats package :-)) I’m forced to use Excel, so I had to draw correlation lines on the graphs, and so didn’t bother calculating the slope.
Yep, we’re eyeballing it here a little. You get what you pay for.
Let’s take a look at the whole urban/rural thang first. Exile mentioned in an earlier post that overall, rural upstate is trending Dem. I believe it, but don’t see it in NY-29, at least as far as the congressional race went:
You probably remember that a flat line basically shows no correlaton. Hmm. Ok, how about median age?
“Negative, Ghost Rider.” It looks like, again, this had no effect. Although, we’d need to get the median age of people who actually voted to truly see if there was a relationship. E.g., if mainly older folks voted in the southern tier vs Monroe, you could argue that the negative anti-Massa ads that lied about him wanting to privatize Social Security worked to scare folks into voting for Kuhl.
How about household income?
Now we’re talking. Does this say that the more wealthy you are, the more likely you are to vote for Massa? Not necessarily– it more shows the north/south differential in the 29th (those two points at the upper right are Monroe and Ontario). Economically, Monroe/Ontario and the Southern Tier are two different beasts. To really understand this correlation, we’d need to do a breakdown of income levels vs. vote for each county. Anyone have some spare time to find and crunch those numbers?
One way that I did look at a breakdown by county was education level. And here we can see a strong correlation, both in terms of % completing highschool, and % getting their Bachelor’s degree. To save electrons, I put both on the same graph:
It looks like the higher the level of education, the more likely to vote for Massa. Does this mean that smart people vote for Massa? Not necessarily– there’s a big difference between “smart” and “educated”. I mean, Dubya graduated from Yale, after all, right? But we may be seeing what some have called the effect of the “Low Information” vs. “High Information” voter. Politics is boring to most people (here at RT we’re trying to change that), so many people get their info from corporate media news, or negative TV ads. And the airwaves were saturated with Kuhl’s negative ads the last 2 weeks before the election. That’s my take on it, anyway.
Comments? Questions? Followup suggestions?
Related posts:
This is extremely interesting - though I’m not sure how useful, yet. And you sure as heck do have too much time on your hands. Tell the truth.
Most statisticians now use R (www.r-project.org) software, which is free and can make beautiful graphs. I’ll take a look at these data in a day or two
See, this is why we hired you. Why, you’re already earning your salary! How about a 15% raise? Let’s see, that’ll bring you up to…uh…
Or, maybe, I had a TON of downtime over thanksgiving. Or at least enough to do this. Here’s to relatives who enjoy taking the kids off our hands every now and then.
Hey - can you take the stats and compare them to Barend’s information? That might provide additional insight into the movement Massa made.
Additionally, the numbers you are using (from my read) are the actual votes cast for Massa (if I am correct) - does the NYS Board of Elections provide breakdowns by registration for each? It would be an interesting measure to see how many people voted in each category and where they lie in the curves you mention.
Sure– I’ll see if I can put that together. I’m just using the percent of the vote Massa got in each county, from the state BoE. It would be interesting to compare that with registration by county as well. We’d have to assume that any outperformance beyond the Dem registration would come primarily from independents and blanks, although I’m sure there were some GOPers in there too, from the experience canvassers had talking to GOP folks.
[...] This is a follow-up to BTP’s insightful election analysis post (link). I’ve been putting together some election results data from the NY-29 congressional election.ÂÂ Right now I’m focused on comparing 2006 to 2004.ÂÂ Where were gains made?ÂÂ The graph below is the percentage of votes for Kuhl, stratified by year and county (sorry for the 4 letter county abbreviations, but had to make it fit!).ÂÂ I sorted the counties by the percentage of votes for Kuhl in 2004. [...]