Election 2010
Now that the election of 2010 is in the history books (or should I say the Government books) the reults are in. Check out the link to the data. Post something profound from the data that you think is worthy of a minute or 2 worth of conversation in class someday in teh future.
eg. About 64.23 million people voted in the 2010 midterm election nationwide. Clearly the nation is fed up with the 2 party system and the haggling between the Democrats and Republicans. In the 2010 election, 3rd parties garnered about 3.78 million votes which accounted for a whopping 5.9% of the popular vote. The message has been sent! Dems and Reps....you can gridlock all you want but when the American people get sooo dissatisfied with the current establishment THEY WILL STILL ELECT ONE OF YOU!
Post by the time we discuss your brilliant find in class.
Mr. Thompson
posted by erdecker @ 11:49 AM
18 comments
18 Comments:
I was on the site, and while I was on it, I stumbled across the a little button off to the side that said, largest margin of victory. Intrigued, I looked at it and I was more that Shocked. In South Dakota, 100% of their vote went to the Republicans, and while that isn't surprising that the Republican's won, I was wondering why it was exactly 100%. Because there is always differences in opinion and not every single person could vote for the Republican canidate.
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I thought it was really interesting that Minnesota was one of the very few number of states that had a prominent third party candidate for Governor. Tom Horner (I) of Minnesota received almost 12% of the votes which is a huge margin. It seems that our state is pretty divided on what our majority party should be (D: 43.63% R: 43.21%).
One of the things I thought was interesting was that Main had two Independent canidates, one of whcih had more votes than the Democratic canidate. Also, there were states such as Colorado and Kansas that had Conservitive and Liberal canidates and in Colorado, the Conservitive canidate had more votes than the Republican canidate.
Also i was confused by what exactly does the Endorsment map tell us?
"We are making a difference in this country and together we will continue to make a difference in this country." This is a quote I pulled from the "Tea Party Patriots" website. After viewing the senatorial election results, I find this quote most amusing. Christine O'donnell, their "champion," got destroyed in the senatorial race in Delaware after receiving only 40% of the popular vote. If by "making a difference" the tea party means "causing a schism in the conservative party and alienating moderate Americans across the country" then yes, the tea party is truly making a difference. Also, I'm sorry I couldn't think of anything else to write about on that website. I just needed to fill up some space on this blog.
I found it interesting that when breaking down the highest and lowest percents of the votes into counties, the top ranking counties were from the same states. It makes sense that if a particular state such as South Dakota has a high percent of voting one way that its counties would rank high, but for the states with a percent of vote less than South Dakota's 100 percent, I would have thought the counties would vary more. This trend of high percentages of the vote for counties within the same state makes sense for the highest ranking states for the smaller parties such as the Green party in South Carolina and the Independents in Florida.
I thought it was interesting that Texas had a relatively close race for governor. I had always thought that Texas was staunchly Republican. However, in the polls, the Republican candidate only received 54.97% of the votes versus the Democrat's 42.48%. I was wondering if Texas' polls were usually this close, or if Texans are becoming dissatisfied with the Republican Party and voting the opposite way.
I was comparing 2008 senatorial results with the 2010 results. I seem to remember that in the 2008 elections, we were all focused on Obama's victory, even though everyone saw it coming. However, the republicans lost more seats in the senate in 2008 than the dems did in 2010. The dems lost the house by a large margin, but I still fail to see why this was an election of such massive importance, especially now that the house and senate have different leading parties. Now nothing is going to get done, and we're going to be angry all over again by 2012.
One thing that I thought was interesting was that in the governor elections, Arkansas voted 64.4% Democrat and 33.5% Republican, but in the senator elections, Arkansas voted 57.8% Republican and 36.9% Democrat. This caught my attention because it is something that we don't see very often, especially with higher percent margins.
I find it odd that in the total percentage of votes for the gubernatorial election republicans only received 2% more of the popular vote yet that translated into a 30% difference in how many states were one. That just goes to show that in an election that does not have an electoral college every vote counts for a very large percent in the final standings.
I found it interesting that the website used blue for the Republican party and red for the Democratic party on the map. They seemed to play on the stereotypes that are used for the political race in the news. It confused me for quite a while until i read the information about the red and blue on the website, there is a link that goes to it. The website was made before the media adopted the certain colors for the parties, and the note explains that.
What I thought was interesting was taking a quick look at the main page you see under the endorse sections a majority of the states are democratic. However, when it came to the winning parties in the polls section and then the predictions of who would win, most of the states were republican. Makes me wonder if the relationship of endorsement and results of an election is.
I was looking at the column of predictions versus with the general election results and it was found to be almost exactly the same and then I compared it to the 2008 elections and it was pretty different. I also went down the page and decided to play with the Electoral College Calculator and experimented with it. It was based off the 2004 presidential election and when I changed the percentage column (I didn't know what it was for), it gave estimates of which candidate won votes within the counties.
I was looking at the Electoral votes by state from the years 1980- 2008, and during that time most states changed by one or two. Some states that changed more significantly were New York(-10), Florida(+10),and California (+10). These changes were bigger than I expected, so I decided to share it.
I thought it was really interesting that Rhode Island elected an Independent Party candidate for governer. Before this election, there were no Independents holding a seat as governer, but now Chafee will be leading Rhode Island. I think it's good that one of our states is willing to put parties aside and vote for someone based on other factors.
This might not be exactly what mr. thompson was looking for but i was getting frustrated looking at all the statistics on the election site..
I found it interesting that Red represents Democrats and Blue represents Republicans since these days it's the opposite. I found a link explaining that the man who created the site has used red for democratic and blue for republicans for many years and it would take way too much work to change all of them to the standard now. I found election maps from Time Magazine up until 2000 using red for democrats and blue for republicans. Interesting. I wonder why it changed.
There are many interesting things about the data, but something weird is that yet again, the Independent and votes for "other" had a much lower count for the popular vote wins and never won over a state in the electoral college this year. If democratic and republican systems are very different from one another, why do presidents always stray from their form of rule expected from their stated D or R form to the other? Thus, a form inbetween; let's say "independent" sounds like it would make the most sense. But, that's definitely not the case. This is, of course, not saying there are good reasons that the votes are fewer than D or R, such as vastly fewer advertising in this category.
What I found really interesting was that as the years have gone on, more state endorsements have been used in elections especially by democrats. Most of the states on the map are dominated by democrats, only north/south dakota, arkansas, south carolina, and florida had more endorsements for a different party. My favorite one was Florida, which had more endorsements for the Independent party.
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