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Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, do you recall seeing a "county map" of the blue votes in the 2020 election?

I don’t personally recall, but it’s kind of a silly idea to break down presidential votes by county anyway. At least counting states matters legally in elections. And counting people matters as a way to judge desires and sentiments.

Counting by counties combines the unrepresentativeness of the Electoral College with the legal irrelevance of the popular vote.

Why would we have? It's pointless. As the GP said, land doesn't vote.

The more interesting map is the one where you weight the display by population, since it gives a much more accurate representation of how the USA is divided: https://engaging-data.com/pages/scripts/d3Electoral/countyel...

The tool on that website is actually pretty informative to play with if you want to quickly see how adjusting the map style can change the perception. https://engaging-data.com/county-electoral-map-land-vs-popul...

Not sure why I can't reply to the sibling comment...

anyway, the reason for the east/west divide in population density is that the west is dry. See maps at climate.gov (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/new-ma...). By convention people refer to this line as being at the "100th meridian" but the 98th may be more accurate.

Bit of a tangent, but I've always wondered why the United States has a very clear dividing line between the populated east and relatively empty west. It's really visible in the first map you shared. Is there a historical reason behind that line? Or some geographical boundary?

It is a function of both geography and history, both based on water. The line you are seeing in the east is the rain shadow of the Rocky mountains.

Moving east from California, you have the great basin desert, followed by the Rocky Mountains, and then the relatively dry great plains.

Population follows precipitation.

https://gisgeography.com/us-precipitation-map/

https://www.thoughtco.com/geography-shapes-us-regional-weath...

My understanding, as an american, is that the Federal government "owns" most of the land west of either the Mississippi River or the Sabine. Or used to "own" it. So getting land for personal/business use in that geographic region is harder than eastward. I don't know the term of art, but it's like the Federal Government - via the BLM, USDA, USFS, or whatever - has right of first refusal for all land sales.

I know that my understanding can be wrong, but this is what i've heard and perusing some maps bears out at least some validity.

If you include Alaska, which is a huge state (I hear bigger than Texas), land starts voting very blue due to Alaskan native influence. They don’t have counties though, just boroughs (Alaska still goes red even if it’s land goes blue due to population distribution).

Louisiana doesn't have counties, either. I live in Louisiana, and when i said "counties" i included the parishes in my state, and any other geographically distinct entity of the same legal merit.

there are 3300 counties in the US. People live in all of those counties.

There are only a few boroughs in Alaska but some of them are larger than Texas.

Did you know that there are about 2,160 counties across these 40 states that collectively have a smaller population than Los Angeles county? Who cares about a "county map"?

people who don't live in Los Angeles might be curious why their neighbors suddenly switched to voting red.

why is everyone assuming that i'm not intelligent enough to know that "land doesn't vote"? The county voting maps are a proxy.

Because they’re a meaningless proxy?

it tells you that your neighbors voted for trump, and we might ask why. It isn't meaningless, if you live in a historically "blue" county and it went red, why did it go red?

I understand that counties can have various sub-regions and cultures and all of that, but not every county does. there's 3300 counties, and people live in all of them. Knowing that your neighbors voted for Trump might incline introspection.

at least that's what i hoped i could point out. Apparently shoot the messenger!

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