The E-R editorial opened its latest column by stating: "The city of Chico has always had liberal leanings, but now the county is following suit."
Not really. The City of Chico has not always had liberal leanings.
The City of Chico only recently - I believe within the last 10 years - had a Democratic Party registration advantage.
Like most of the country, the City of Chico has a significant and growing independent voting population whose leanings are difficult to assess but I've always felt were pragmatic, non-ideological moderate voters.
Today's Scrabble word is hondle, or to haggle, which is what some people do when they bargain shop.
Dan,
Mere is a more complete picture. Makes yous ee red doesn't it?
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/11/06/popular_vote_pop/
Anthony -
Most of those vast red areas are counties with very little population, so your map presents a distorted view of the election results. I suggest this page for a more complete picture, particularly the population cartograms. There's a nice discussion here about distorting election results with county maps.
The latter link also mentions the book How to Lie with Maps, which I highly recommend.
Makes you see blue, doesn't it?
Ah Chuckles, please don't lecture me about maps or suggest that I'm posting "lying maps". That's disengenuous.
Give me a little credit there. I know about the population distribution of the USA. I work with maps daily.
The point is, if you are showing maps counting "counties won", as Dan did with his original posted map, then the maps I posted is just as valid. I'll also point out lots of those red counties in California also have very little population...Modoc and Lassen for example. Riverside, San bernadino, southern blues, are mostly desert, also with low population density/sq mile.
"Distorted view" works both ways. I can claim the very same thing about the California map for the same reason. But I didn't. I simply suggested a "more complete picture" which does in fact show all USA counties that swayed red and blue. There's no distortion if the intent is only to show counties that had the majority of Democrat/Republican votes.
The voting data is real and as presented, as counties, accurate for both the California and USA maps.
Your issue is that you don't like the area presented, which again is not counties.
Talk about distortion though, that link you provided has the population weighted cartograms are the most useless maps I've ever seen.
This one looks like a bad acid trip:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/countycartnonlin384.png
Only a statistics wonk could claim that type of paint spin art reflects anything useful. Maybe we'll see it in the next Bob Mulholland mailer, or maybe it is Salvador Dali's melted view of the election results. Could be a new art peice for downtown. let's get Gregg Payne on it.
For fun try publishing those in the paper, or put them on TV and tell the general population the take on them...yeah that will work. Heh.
How to lie with maps, indeed.
Anthony -
I stand by what I said.
BTW, I assume you posted a map of all US counties, evidently because "you [didn't] like the area presented." It was a bit of a leap, given that Dan and the E-R was discussing California (not US) county voting trends. So here's another leap, showing a "more complete picture" of how the entire world would have voted in this last US election, if they could.
Makes you see blue, doesn't it?
The map linked stating the entire world's position has no relevance to this entire thread. The world doesn't get to, and has no right to, vote in this matter. Again, someone who supports blue strays from the facts to distract from them. Anthony is right to post the complete picture. The original picture shows California broken down, with the states surrounding it not done. If one is going to break it down by counties, the complete picture has a right to be shown as well.
It would actually be really cool, and quite interesting, to see it broken down per square mile (or some other distance). I believe that would really show the urban bias of the blue shade.
BTW--If I were living somewhere other than the greatest country on this earth, I would want Obama to win as well. What makes your enemy weaker, makes you stronger would be my thinking.