Purple America Has All but Disappeared

fivethirtyeight.com

17 points·mrjaeger··6 comments

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Everyone wants to blame gerrymandering, but how does that affect presidential votes?

I wouldn't think that it does. Your local district doesn't dictate who your presidential vote is for.

"President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was among the narrowest in history,"

goes to show image showing that a huge amount of counties voted for Trump by more than 20 points

Hmm.

> Everyone wants to blame gerrymandering

For bizarre Congressional outcomes, yes. That's not new. The article does not mention gerrymandering at all. Districts just happen to be the most-granular level of voting-data most folks have to work with, and when they get redrawn you need to do something to help compare elections from before and after the redraw.

> "President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was among the narrowest in history,"

Well, yeah. That's not new news either. [0]

> image showing that a huge amount of counties

No, it shows a large land area of counties. It doesn't tally up the number of discrete counties, nor is it adjusted for their wildly varying populations.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic but the election victory was narrow. The population of the country isn't uniform.

I don't understand. The author is insisting on Twitter that gerrymandering isn't involved, "the boundaries of America's counties didn't change since 1992."

So when did Electoral Districts become inconsequential?

They're not inconsequential, but the analysis they did seems to have been in terms of counties, not districts, which would insulate their results from being explained simply as gerrymandering.

I can't help but wonder how much of this is just the evidence of rampant gerrymandering.

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