Dr. Frank's What's-it

Interesting graphic Dr. Frank.
Im looking on the website and I was just wondering if there was a key for the map. What exactly is the height of the bar related to? Total number of votes? Difference in vote percentage? I couldnt find the key on the main site. But it is neat to look at.

Wow, if I squint, I think I can see myself.

y'know once we dense chicagoans crawl out of our old style haze we actually vote! duhhhh. hey man, we's a state of th' union jes like calli fornie! whoooo (spit) mus be nice out thar, real niiiice.

That looks about right. That's why I love living here in Chicago so much. Okay, I lied. I'm a suburbanite, but whatever.

I don't know how it is in upstate New York or northern California, but a little bit of trivia for y'all: Most people in Illinois, outside of the Chicagoland area, totally resent us for trying to tell them how to live...How fast they can drive, how many trout they can catch or deer they can bag.

That's not going to make them turn down the huge chunk of change that they get from Cook County taxes though. Somebody has to pay for those farm subsidies.

That sounds like a Democratic idea, giving extra money to hard working farmers. Why do they tend to vote Republican?

I think that's kind of how it works here in the Midwest. One or two big blue cities in an otherwise deep-red state. Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Detroit, Toledo. Just kidding on the last one.

Chicago just happens to be the biggest of the Midwest blues. That's why you don't have to wait until midnite to find out who won our electorates.

The size of the bars on the graph? That's how high we were when we pulled the lever. Now I understand why I had to pee in a cup to vote.

dude, i'm high and everybody hates me!
what burb are you from Tim?

Does anyone know if there's a specific reason that the southern part of Texas is blue?

I can't believe I missed the more obvious one.

That's the Sears Tower.

I'm from Rolling Meadows/Arlington Heights, but I've been up in Lake Villa (near Gurnee) for the past eight years.

Dems just jokes. I don't smoke pot and not too many people hate me on a personal level 'cause I'm such a great guy.

It is true that many people in red-Illinois don't care for the fact that their rules and regulations come out of blue-Illinois. I doubt the state would be any different if we voted red in the north. It's more of a general complaint. Something like, "I don't know how you guys in a city 200 miles away could possibly know what our needs are out here in the country."

A lot of our downstate friends just don't feel like they're being treated as equals. I've never heard of a specific complaint though.

ah, okay.. i'm from the northbrook area. 'tween deerfield and glenview. i appreciate your views. i think in a lot of ways you're dead on there.. quite a machine it is.

Just to point one thing out, Tim, you said:

"I think that's kind of how it works here in the Midwest. One or two big blue cities in an otherwise deep-red state."

Well, looking at the map that seems to apply to California, New York, Florida, Washington, Oregon, and Pennsylvania as well.

And btw, I loooooooooooooooove Chicago. :D

Wish I was living there instead of Florida.

The southern part of Texas is blue because they voted for John Kerry. The border area is very poor, and a large percentage of 1st and 2nd generation Mexican-Americans.

I'm in that little bit of blue sticking up in the middle of Texas (Austin).

The blue city in a red state applies to my state of Delaware as well. We're a tiny state, and when the counties are broken down, we're 2/3 red. But the state as a whole went blue because the largest city, Wilmington, is in the smallest county. Delaware is actually the only state east of the Mason-Dixon line (fun fact!), but it's pretty much accepted that downstate is part of the south and upstate (which is part of the greater Philadelphia area) is part of the north. Don't tell downstaters we're anything but southern, though. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Have there been any studies about why the big cities voted liberal? I mean anything more than, 'because people in big cities are liberal.' Because I thought that terrorism was one of the main points of this election, and you'd think they'd be more worried about being targets than the small towns...

This is going to come off as elitist so I must preface that I remember this from a discussion on Politically Incorrect after the 2000 election.

One of the guests suggested that in the cities, you're confronted with people from all walks of life and it gives you an appreciation for diversity. It makes you want to help your neighbors out. The people in the red areas just want to be left alone and don't really care about the people they'll never meet.

The exact quote was closer to, "Do you notice that liberals tend to be from areas where you're forced to get along with other people, while conservatives could give a rat's ass?".

I don't totally agree with that, but there is a bit of truth there. The Republican platform used to be, "Vote for us and we'll leave you the hell alone". Of course, they've pulled a complete 180 on that, but nobody really seems to mind.

Well, there is also a long standing correlation between higher levels of education and being a Democrat. Most of those red spots on the map tend to require less of people in that department to scratch out a decent living. Seriously. Where I'm from you can still drop out of school at 16 and do okay for yourself. (You can eat, have a roof over your head, a steady job, etc. Hell, I know people raising families in that situation.) I know if someone wants to they can make that work about anywhere, but I think its a lot easier in Indiana and places like it. The cost of living is just so low, $20-30K goes a long way, and you really only need around $15K if you are on your own.

Which begs a chicken-egg kind of question. Does more education tend to make you more leftist? Or do left leaning people tend to pursue more education?

I suppose its kind of both, but I lean more towrds the former. I don't know that edcucation necessarily makes you any smarter, but it certainly can have an effect on your beliefs...and that's what we're really talking about here.

Anyway, the point is I think higher level of education is something voters in those blue spikes are being exposed to that has a significant effect on the way they vote. Also, I think people with left leaning politcial tendencies are drawn to cities...for the jobs that are available to them there because of their education and for the "experience." I guess I think some of those areas attract as many liberals as they produce, because those people tend not to want to stay in red areas that they came from for reasons Dr. Frank finds amusing, and I find, well, hypocritical.

Eh, scratch "hypocritical" and replace with Dr. Franks "lacking in self awareness." So much more appropriate. I do find it amusing myself, but more disturbing than I know he does because I love my home and there was time I really started to resent being from there and that was closely tied to my political beliefs. That just didn't make sense to me. Ok, I'll stop before this turns into a therapy session.

"One of the guests suggested that in the cities, you're confronted with people from all walks of life and it gives you an appreciation for diversity."

I don't buy that one. All blue state cities are not like NYC - New England has some of the least diverse cities in the country. Texas, for example, is WAY more diverse, as is almost all of the South.

Yes, that's true. You can say the same for a lot of midwestern cities as well. Indianapolis never seemed particular diverse to me. Plenty of cities have the raw numbers to create diversity, but the different populations don't interact much.

Where I used to live in Muncie 1 in 6 people are black. You'd never know it though, unless you came in through Whiteley (yep, the "black part of town" is called Whiteley) on the east side of town. Then you'd think the whole town was black.

1 in 6 people are not black at the grocery store, at the mall, at the movies, at the restaurant you just ate at, or most places in Muncie. But talk to any of the older residents, black or white, and they will tell you that it is better than it used to be. Not to mention there is a visible increase in my lifetime of Asian and Latino presence in the Midwest.

The walls are coming down, though, as I think the younger generations are noticably more accepting of all people and a lot of that has to do with familiarity.

School bussing was a huge setback in Midwest race relations. Instead of allowing gradual integration it caused a huge knee jerk backlash in the other direction. Large numbers of upper-middle class white people abandoned their inner city homes to form suburban communities where there kids could go to all white schools. This is why your average Midwestern city has a poor black community living in what looks like it used to be a very nice neighborhood once upon a time. It's one of the saddest and strangest (just to see all the run down houses that you can tell used to be so nice and then know WHY) things you'll ever see.

But all that is being undone as more minorites come to the Midwest to seek oppotunity. Also, younger people today, in general, are just more openly accepting of others and I think there there is a kind of pride you see amongst their diversity-challenged parents, because that is what you find a lot of out there across the Midwest: people who want a more diverse community, but they don't know where or how to start.

So yeah, just because you have a mixed community doesn't mean the community is mixing. Though I think that you will find in _most_ of the big blue spikes on the map that you will be "confronted with people from all walks of life."

To some degree, I think political culture is a shame society. Supporting the "wrong" party entails inconvenience, abuse, and quite a bit of hassle in your day to day life, and people have to have a really good reason to diverge from what's expected of them. Otherwise, it's just not worth it. A charismatic politician, or an issue which is burning enough, can create enough cross-cultural consensus to embolden enough people to break ranks and tip the balance in one direction in spite of the social consequences. But our primary system has lately been pretty effective at weeding out the charismatic politicians, and this time around "the issues" turned out to be a wash. So most of us stayed in our corners. Kerry ended up irritating a slightly greater number of people in the cranky, uncommitted center than Bush did, and lost narrowly. Way back, the Republicans were the progressive party of self-perceived sophisticates, and the Democrats were the party of the jes plain folks heartland. Somewhere along the line they switched sides. Maybe they'll switch again one day. It really seems to me that political faith isn't as rational as it's cracked up to be.

"...our primary system has lately been pretty effective at weeding out the charismatic politicians..."

I couldn't agree more. To quote South Park: "But Stan, it's always between a giant douche and a turd sandwich."

So true, so true.

i love zach carrol