The two maps above show the Democratic and Republican counties in blue and red respectively. Carter in the 1976 presidential election, and Obama in 2008. A few days ago it was brought to my attention that Matt Yglesias was curious about how Maine become a Democratic leaning state in the past generation. How is a deep question I'll leave to political scientists, but how about the patterns of voting Democratic over elections by state for the past 100 years? That's not too hard to find, there's state-level election data online. So I just calculated the correlations between past elections and Democratic results, and Obama's performance in 2008. If you're a junkie of political science I assume you've seen something like this....
There is county level data out there, but it is hard to find the older stuff online. If you have some, especially the 1856 election, please contact me! If not, and you want to enter the data in by hand (you can find it in most libraries), I am willing to pay (I tried doing this once, but found it too boring). Sorry if political posts bother you! But my Twitter feed and Facebook are starting to get inundated with dozens of posts every day on the perfidy of the Republican party. It's hard to not think about politics a little....
