Electoral College Maps - 1972 through 2008

Presented as a public service....

Here are the Electoral College Presidential Election maps going back to 1972, all from the American Presidency Project. Fascinating stuff.  (I might be the first person to put this many of the Red/Blue maps on one page.)  This should make it easier to scroll up and down and watch the voting patterns change.  For instance, if someone can knock Minnesota out of their blue habit, he'll be the first to do so since 1972.   

Hitting the link above each map will take you to a detailed analysis of each election, a tally of the Electoral College votes allocated to each state at the time, plus a state-by-state vote total and other trivia. 

For instance, if you dig into the first link, you'll learn that in 1972, the Libertarian Party's candidate, John Hospers, received one electoral vote from a "faithless" elector in Virginia.  (If you sat through a Republican primary campaign and wound up having to vote for Richard "Wage And Price Controls" Nixon.....well, you would do what you had to do.  May his tribe increase.)   

Here's 1972. Richard Nixon got 520 Electoral votes with George McGovern only taking 17 (Massachusetts).

Here's 1976.  Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's Vice-President, had just resigned.  Gerald Ford was appointed to fill in as V.P.  Then Nixon resigned.  Ford then slid up to the Oval Office.  The Republicans went ahead and gave Ford the nomination, since it appeared to be his turn.  Then Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election with 297 votes to Ford's 240. 

Here's 1980.  Jimmy Carter couldn't accomplish much for the economy (but thank God almighty he deregulated the trucking, airling, and beer industries) and he couldn't get the hostages out of Iran.  Ronald Reagan defeated Carter 489 to 49, with Carter carrying only his home state of Georgia, plus West Virginia, Maryland, Hawaii, VP Walter Mondale's Minnesota, Hawaii, and D.C. 

Here's 1984.  Ronald Reagan handily defeated Walter Mondale, 525 to 13.  Mondale captured nothing but his ever-loyal Minnesota, plus D.C. 

Here's 1988.  Riding on the popularity of Reagan, George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis 426 to 111. 

Here's 1992.  Bill Clinton came from out of nowhere to beat George Bush the Elder by a total of 370 to 168.  Ross Perot may have helped take some votes from Bush.  Remember this, Republicans....If you say "no new taxes", you better mean it.  There's a lot of blue spread over this map. 

Here's 1996.  Clinton had been doing well.  The Republicans trotted out Bob Dole because it was his turn.  Clinton won handily, 379 to 159.  (Montana, Georgia, Arizona and Colorado did some flip-flopping this time as compared to 1994.) 

Here's 2000.  George W. Bush barely squeaked by Al Gore, Clinton's V.P., by a score of 271 to 267.  Broward County, Florida.  Hanging "chads".  The Everglades rose from the weight of all the lawyers in Florida.  Incredibly close.  Democrats can safely blame this one on Bill Clinton's zipper issues.

 

Here's 2004.  George W. Bush beat John Kerry, 286 to 252.  Looks like New Mexico and Iowa changed sides after the previous contest. 

Here's 2008.  The Democrats had a new guy named Barack Obama.  The Republicans nominated John McCain because it was his turn.  Obama won, 365 to 173.  Hit the link to learn why Nebraska has a blue zit coming out of its nose. 

To be continued, sometime in November.  Pretty cool, huh??

Right To Work States, 2008 Red States, and Swing States

My employer, Jukt Micronics, is about to open another factory at a location on the east coast.  (One of the east coast states is going to give us a deal on land, building, and equipment that will make the deal you gave us on forklifts look downright stingy.  Thank you so much, all you little people in the 99%.  PLEASE, please, please, keep voting for Democrats.) 

While I was researching the area, I looked up a map of the Right To Work states.  Places where you aren't forced to give money to a labor union. 

Mitch Daniels of Indiana has somehow managed to convert his state from Hoffa to Choice since this map was produced.  That's the only exception I've found.  Color Indiana red.   

 
The work map looked familiar. 
I looked up an electoral college map of the 2008 elections. 

Wow. 
The only outliers are Hawaii, Nevada, Montana, Iowa, Missouri, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana and Florida. 

Ok, here's a map of what CBS calls the Battleground States for 2012:

Of the outlier Union Vs. Choice states, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Iowa all made the CBS list.  (Some other Battleground/Swing State lists included Missouri and Indiana!) 

If the economy is supposedly the #1 issue, then whether or not a worker should be forced to give money to a union is the filter through which the issue is seen.
Fascinating stuff, I think. 

From the people who want to control the economy, your health, police the world, and lower sea-levels

Here are the press credentials for the next Teleprompter Jesus campaign trip. 
The states where the Teleprompter will be installed are shown in white. 

Note to the Brits, Aussies and Canadians who visit this site regularly:  Denver, the last city on the list of Teleprompter stops, is in Colorado.  The Obama team highlighted Wyoming instead. 
Hey, a square state is a square state. 

Let's go down to the North Pole

Have you ever wondered what our maps would look like if more of the early influential cartographers had been born in the Southern Hemisphere?
Here you go.
Notice that Hema Maps, made the same mistake that we often do when they labeled this little gem.  This is not an upside down map.  Earth does not have a top or a bottom.  There is no "up" or "down" in space.  There's just a north and south in relation to our orbit around the sun. 
Can you tell what else is different? 
Look at it for a few minutes before turning your laptop upside down....

(The Orient is located where we traditionally place The Occident.  Google it if you gotta.)

Found the map here. 

How to get from Fort Worth, TX to China

1) Go to Google Maps

2) Hit "Get Directions"

3) Type in "Fort Worth, TX" in blank A

4) Type "China" in blank B

Pay particular attention to the instructions for getting across the Pacific Ocean. 

Google is pure, undiluted greatness ! 

High taxes equal high emigration and high deficits

This is from the TaxProf blog, where Paul L. Caron lists the states with the highest tax rates for top earners.  All of these are Blue States that went for Obama, by the way:

1. Hawaii:  11% (income over $400,000 (couple), $200,000 (single))
2. Oregon:  11% (income over $500,000 (couple), $250,000 (single))
3. California: 10.55% (income over $1 million)
4. Rhode Island:  9.9% (income over $373,650)
5. Iowa:  8.98% (income over $64,261)
6. New Jersey  8.97% (income over $500,000)
7. New York:  8.97% (income over $500,000)
8. Vermont:  8.95% (income over $373,650)
9. Maine:  8.5% (income over $39,549 (couple), $19,749 (single))
10. Washington, D.C.:  8.5% (income over $40,000)

Ok, so what? 
Well, this is from the Wall Street Journal.  It's a map showing the migration patterns from state to state. 

With the exception of Oregon, all of the top tax states lost population from 2008 to 2009.  Most of them were already losing population in the earlier time period. 

Entrepreneurs don't like putting money at risk in places where greedy little government munchkins can confiscate more of their increasingly unlikely earnings. 

(Washington D.C. isn't shown on these maps, and would probably be an exception to all trends since it is ground zero for the currently popular porkfests.  Looters are moving there to be a part of the ongoing orgy of stimulus pillaging.)

But don't state governments need more money to operate?  Can't states just increase the tax percentage and have an automatic increase in revenue? 

Here's a map from The Economic Populist, showing each state's budget deficit as a percentage of the state's overall budget:

Hawaii is the only pale outsider among the ten listed by The TaxProf above. All of the other top tax states have a large gap between revenue and spending.  (Granted, a state can "go Reagan" with low taxes and insanely high spending levels and go dark brown on this map.) 
So what does it all mean? 

Be like Texas.  Take less away from people.  Spend less of their money.  You'll probably end up with more people and more money. 

I hope Atlas doesn't shrug

From Wired magazine:

Nick Newcomen did a road trip over 30 days that covered stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. First, he identified on a map the route he would need to drive to spell out the message. He put a GPS device in his car to trace the route he would follow. Then, he hit the road.

“The main reason I did it is because I am an Ayn Rand fan,” he says. “In my opinion if more people would read her books and take her ideas seriously, the country and world would be a better place — freer, more prosperous and we would have a more optimistic view of the future.”

Newcomen, unlike previous GPS artists, actually traveled the lines he traced on the map. He used a GPS logger (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) to “ink” the message. Starting his trip in Marshall, Texas, he turned on the device when he wanted to write a letter and turned off the device between letters. The recorded GPS data was loaded into Google Earth to produce the image above. below:

Now THAT is dedication. 





Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/worlds-biggest-writing/#ixzz0wXkYgIPD

Let's redraw the map !

The good people at The Economist magazine have come up with a fantasy map of Europe.
If you've followed the travails of the EU for the last decade, this thing is FUNNY. 



The good folks at Reason magazine have opened their comment field for suggestions for the United States version. 

All right-thinking citizens, of course, want to float California out into the Pacific and let it sink under the weight of its own incredible debt. 
We could move Arizona further away from the Mexico border, just to give sheriff Joe Arpaio a break. 

One guy suggested that we "move DC to Salina, KS. That way all the people who speak for the regular Americans can meet them for once. This will also give VA, MD and DE a break from government busybodies making local laws."

My suggestions?

Let each state with beachfront drill for oil closer to the coastline.  Those who do not allow oil companies to drill in reasonable locations will be swapped out with an interior state.  OR drug out into the ocean where the oil is beneath a mile of water. 

In exchange for producing William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Jimmy Buffett, Archie Manning, Jim Henson, Jerry Rice, and Walter Payton, The Great State Of Mississippi gets to stay where it is, but will be renamed "Awesomeland". 

All states that do not allow gay marriage will be consolidated someplace in the upper Midwest.  This way, they won't be offended by gays, lesbians, or tasteful interior decor. 

Move the entire government apparatus currently in Washington, D.C. to an abandoned Sam's Club warehouse in Hobbes, New Mexico.  Do NOT pay any moving expenses for employees or government officials.  Take extensive notes on whether the economy improves or deteriorates afterwards. 

Consolidate California and Tennessee so that Al Gore's two mega-mansions will be closer together, thereby shrinking Gore's carbon footprint. 

Let's have a referendum on ObamaCare® so that the states favoring socialized medicine can cluster around their V.A. hospitals.  Move the Border Fence around these states, and allow the Free Market nation to impose a "medical tourism" tax on anyone crossing over. 

We should attach hundreds of chain hoists to Las Vegas and drag it to the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas.  I'm tired of driving to Shreveport to get to blackjack tables with player-friendly rules.  The remainder of Nevada will be uprooted and moved to Iraq.  After all, they produced Senator Harry Reid. 

Hawaii should be dropped into the center of Kenya, ending the Barack Obama "birther" controversy once and for all. 

The scariest map you'll ever see

Want to see something scary? This is what U.S. unemployment looked like in January 2007.

Blue/Green on this map represents high employment. Red/Brown equals moderate unemployment. Yellow/Tan means low unemployment.

I found it on Small Dead Animals, but that's not the link you need to hit just yet.

Hang with me a second. Do you ever wonder why "small l" libertarians and "Capital L" Libertarians make such a big deal over the 10th amendment? (The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.)

The 10th Amendment allows us to experiment. For instance, if Mississippi once had laws prohibiting any industry but cotton farming, and Alabama didn't, well, one can glance at a map like this one and see that Mississippi is getting punished for that decision. And plenty of others. In 2007, the Alabama/Mississippi boundary was as plain as the lines separating Haley Barbour's chins.

The 10th amendment, very much under attack in the current Federalist nightmare, allows individual states to opt out of lemming-like conformity to one another.

What the heck was wrong in South Carolina in 2007? I won't pretend to know. But South Carolina operates under one set of laws and regulations, while nearby Georgia operates under another. Otherwise, they are only separated by an invisible line.

Why was rust belt Indiana faring better than the regulatory hell of Michigan? Or its backwoods neighbor Kentucky? I don't know.

Now hit this link to watch a monthly update of the same map, from January 2007 to now. Almost every U.S. county changes to a less desirable color, but some places are doing much better than others.

Last, go to this map published by the State Policy Index site, ranking every U.S. state by economic freedom, economic freedom being defined as an overall absence of nanny-state maternalism. Look for pages 22 and 23.

There isn't a perfect correlation between high employment and economic freedom, but perfect correlations don't exist. Economic freedom is a good thing. Regulatory hells are not.

Note to everyone moving to Texas from California, trying to outrun the consequences of your votes: Please stay home on election day.

Note to everyone living outside the Texas/Wyoming "Freedom Belt": Welcome to Mississippi.

The world was our oyster

If you think our tendency toward nation-building is out of control now, check out this map. It was apparently drawn sometime in 1942 as the outgrowth of FDR's "Four Freedom's" speech - an address that I used as a jumping-off point for this post.

Looking back on it, the arrogance is astounding.

It takes a little while to download, but is worth the wait. You can click to zoom in or out.

Check out bullet-point number 26.

270 To Win

Here's a fun toy that you can mess with until election day.
It's called 270 To Win.
270 is the number of Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
They have an interactive map that will show you the Red State/Blue State (or Green State/Black State if you go back a ways) for every election since George Washington beat the tar out of John Adams in 1789.

Go ahead and mess with it a while. Please come back.....

It's interesting to start in 1960 and watch the Deep South go from Blue to Red to split as the candidates go from Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. (I think that's the correct order.....)

And if you go even further back to the period immediately before the Civil War, the South goes anti-Lincoln Blue, then goes plaid until the 1880's (because of carpetbaggers and the brief period of Black Suffrage???), and then stays Democrat Blue for a long, long time.

Real Clear Politics will eventually have similar maps. But 270 To Win shows you the history going back to day one.