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Cartographicum Thandeum

@Zachnassian reminded me of my map of New Hampshire's utterly insane state house (from 2012, showing majority shades based on counting only the votes for the top-scoring candidate of that party per district in the case of multi-member districts), so I decided to try to map the presidential election of that year on the same boundaries (as this data is available from DailyKos). While I've used a newer colour scheme so direct comparison may be a bit iffy, you can see that the broad patterns are similar, but it's a nicer progression of colour shades with fewer weird results. And yes, even though NH is pretty good about not having too many unopposed elections (especially given the number of seats involved), there are several cases of unopposed Republican state reps' districts being carried by Barack Obama and not The Worst Person Ever To Have Lived (R-MI UT MA UT).

1530706981569.png

They also have 2016 data...hmm.
 
And here is 2016. While Clinton narrowly carried it over Trump, there was a strong swing to the GOP compared to 2012. It feels fairly dramatic across the state, though some areas became more Democratic instead. (Hmm, swing map?) I was going to say that I expected urban centres to get more Democratic and rural ones to get more Republican, but that Rochester result is...something.

1530710295901.png
 
And because apparently I am a glutton for punishment, here is a swing map.

1530795238931.png

Obviously it's mostly red because Trump performed better than Romney / Clinton worse than Obama. However, there are some areas that went the other way, and I'm not entirely sure of the reasons behind it - they generally seem to be more urban and more wealthy areas, but that doesn't seem a clear enough correlation. That one seat in Grafton County in particular was over 60% majority Democratic for Clinton, the only place in the state that was, and can't see why. Any thoughts?
 
Thande said:
Obviously it's mostly red because Trump performed better than Romney / Clinton worse than Obama. However, there are some areas that went the other way, and I'm not entirely sure of the reasons behind it - they generally seem to be more urban and more wealthy areas, but that doesn't seem a clear enough correlation. That one seat in Grafton County in particular was over 60% majority Democratic for Clinton, the only place in the state that was, and can't see why. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

I'm just going to toss out an idea with no evidence behind it: Self segregation? As in, the demographics that vote Democratic moved into an area that already resembled a place that would appeal to people of said demographics?
 
Thande said:
A work in process @Ciclavex

View attachment 3557

(You might ask yourself, why does the world need another Pennsylvania county map? The answer is 1) this is only the first step, 2) I've coloured it with 2016 data on the Wiki colour scheme just to test the flood boundaries were in place, and 3) this is not full scale...)
Click to expand...
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
 
Ow. Ow. Ow. Tracer's hand. Ow.

Just Philadelphia and its environs to do now, which unfortunately will likely require an inset (Pittsburgh I managed to do without).

As @Ares96 and @Alex Richards will recall from my previous adventure in Virginia, we've got that classic American state legislature thing of having a numbering scheme that almost makes sense, and then after all the other single digit districts are in the north-west corner, district 5 randomly shows up in the south-east.

1533309780875.png
 
While finishing the map, I decided to spreadsheet up the date from the last election to prepare. Whether it's PA or 2016, this time Ballotpedia hasn't recorded votes cast in unopposed elections, only contested ones. This does, however, mean we can make a direct comparison to the presidential election on the same day:

Presidential election in Pennsylvania 2016
Republican 2,970,733
Democratic 2,926,441
Libertarian 146,715
Green 49,941
Constitution 21,572
Other 50,076
Total 6,165,478 (60.3% VAP turnout)

State House election in Pennsylvania 2016
Republican 1,858,001
Democratic 1,458,880
Libertarian 8,354
Green 5,730
Independent/Unaffiliated 22,711
Other (inc. Constitution) 5,429
Total 3,359,105

pErFeCtLy NoRmAl DeMoCrAcY
 
Finally finished the Pennsylvania State House blank map @Ciclavex

There's something fundamentally unsatisfying about making US state legislature maps - because of the arcane and obtuse formats that the source maps are in, you feel like you've put more effort into the process than the actual US politicians have. After spending ages tracing all the squiggly lines, you end up colouring most of them in the unopposed colour anyway.

Regardless, here's the full-size blank map (click to enlarge). I will probably end up finding some errors as I colour it in.

View attachment 3966
 
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