Interesting. Population density over county geographical size seems to be an interesting axis. I wonder how that correlates with the presence/absence of large cities. Normally the density of population is significantly more dramatic with cities. I wonder if the underlying x-axis narrative can be remapped to “counties with big cities”.

Interesting find. Thank you for sharing.

Wait a minute... Cities tend to vote Democratic?

I've been looking through the exceptions to the low density = Republican leaning rule:

1. Ziebach country, SD super poor and entirely within an Indian reservation

2. Blaine County, MT bellweather state, there's a tribal Native American college there.

3. Skagway, AK Big tourist town, no obvious reason it should vote Democrat.

4. San Juan Country, CO No obvious reason it should vote Democrat.

5. Grand County, UT Bellweather state and tourist area.

6. Richmond County AKA Staten Island Can't quite explain in terms of demographic variables why Staten Island goes GOP.

That's the thing I'm always trying to tell people: there aren't really red states and blue states - there are states that have more people living in cities and there are states that have more people living in the country. Even urban districts in Texas go Democrat..

[removed]

it'd be interesting to see all the circles plotted by circle size (i.e voters). it looks overwhelmingly (in fact exclusively) large circle = blue. In fact, the biggest red circle (by eye) is Suffolk, which is 0%. Which brings up a point, why is it red?

According to Wikipedia, Suffolk County went Republican by a 0.03% spread (a margin of 231 votes out of 773,287 total votes cast).

So I guess it’s red because the GOP got the most votes but the gap was effectively zero for this level of precision

[removed]

Duh…supports theory liberals are like rats in a cage…at some level of population, they start becoming cannibals. Humans were never meant for communities as large as even our smaller cities.

Get off the internet, grampa.

There's a general trend that denser places are more populated in total. San Bernardino, CA is an interesting exception of a low density place with a lot of total people.

I'm referring to the color. It appears that the all the large areas (circle size, which I presume is total votes) are blue. It appears, just eyeballing it, that the top 30 'total votes' counties are all blue. Probably more, a lot more.

It looks like you have to go all the way down to Collins County TX to finally get a red circle.

The fact that it is such a stark contrast, with none of them being republicans, is quite interesting. The rule seems to be "if you have more than 500,000 voters, then you vote democrat".

on the low end, the small circles, seem to be fairly distributed between blue and red.

Right and I'm just making the connection that this works because overall population of a country closely tracks with density anyway, so it's a slightly different observation of th same phenomenon.

[deleted]

>It’s clear there is a very strong correlation between the vote margin and population density.

What's the actual r coefficient for the first diagram? Could you share a csv or something? I wonder if "very strong correlation" might be overstating it, the inclusion of larger size data points in the scatter plot makes it seem to trend more up and right so it's a bit hard to tell visually.

Not mine, but:

>Data and Tools The 2020 county-level election data is downloaded from the New York Times county election data API and processed using a python script. Population data used is for 2018.

So I guess that's how you get the data.

San Berdoo County is massive. The Inland Empire portion is as densely populated as parts of LA, the High Desert has some sizeable cities, but the vast majority of it is empty desert.