Coping With Post-Partisan Depression

BOULDER, Colorado -- Whenever I read the Washington Post's election blog, "PostPartisan," I can't help but think of Brooke Shields, and Tom Cruise, and that woman in Texas who drowned all of her children. What else could that be a pun on besides "postpartum"? "Post mortem"? Or does it simply imply, "the Post is partisan"?

To help you deal with your withdrawal symptoms after the close of this campaign season, I have a few election-related, time-wasting links to share. Jon Kilpinen from the Department of Geography at Valparaiso University sent this list to the Political Geography Specialty Group for the Association of American Geographers (of which I am a member), so enjoy parsing election returns and exit polls:

I'm sure many of you have seen these, but here are some links to various versions of the presidential election results at the county level.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/results.htm

The USA Today maps have a "time lapse" effect, but more interesting are the "Filter by Demographics" options on the right-hand toolbar. These let you consider the relationship between the voting results and the ages, minority status, and income of these same areas.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/election/uscounties.html

The Washington Post site has three different versions of county-level results: the standard red/blue map, a margin of victory map, and a rotatable 3-D map.

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

The New York Times page opens with the state-level electoral map, but includes three interesting county-level options in the list of links below "State winners" on the left. The "County bubbles" map is a graduated circle map, which shows the overwhelming dominance Obama demonstrated in the larger metropolitan areas some of today's earlier postings referred to. The "County leaders" map shows the party votes in percentage terms. The "Voting shifts" option shows the remarkable Democratic gains at the county level for most of the country, as well as the increased Republican support in the belt from the Texas Panhandle to West Virginia, with a small southward extension into Louisiana. The really great feature of these maps is the "slider" tool that lets you see the same maps from all of the elections going back to 1992.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

Mark Newman's page of election maps contains the 2008 version of the "purple" map, as well as traditional red/blue maps and his cartogram versions of all the maps.

http://www.beyondredandblue.org/

Robert David Sullivan's page, if you have not seen it, goes beyond red and blue through an analysis of political regions. While this site does not contain maps of voting results, per se, but it does offer the kind of regional analysis that interests most of us.

My old standby, fivethirtyeight.com, is still churning out numbers, as some states and Senate races are still up in the air. I am going to miss Nate Silver's wisdom, so perhaps I will buy myself a subscription to Baseball Prospectus, his usual employer.