2008 Connecticut Democratic Primary Results Map

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Because the Nutmeg state reports results by Township rather than county, we can get a much finer-grained pictures of who's voting for Hillary Clinton and who's voting for Barack Obama. This lets us see the modest —and let me emphasize modest—class-based divide between Clinton and Obama voters in the Northeast.

The overall picture here is that Barack Obama won the exurbs of New York, in the Southwest corner of the state, as well as the area surrounding New Haven (Yale), Mansfield (UConn), Windsor (University of Hartford), and Lyme (Connecticut College). Clinton held Obama close in Hartford itself and won various working-class regions: suburbs outside of New Haven and Hartford, plus a big chunk of Eastern Connecticut. But there's one exception to this egghead/lunchbucket divide. Northwest Connecticut is less educated and has a lower average income than the rest of the state, but it's some of the strongest Obama territory there is. I have no good explanation for this.

Long-time Ezra Klein readers may recognize that this map looks an awful lot like the Lieberman-Lamont primary results. Essentially, Lamont voters became Obama voters, while Lieberman voters became Clinton voters. That's not, I think, particularly surprising.

Comments

[The Navigator]

I grew up a few miles from the University of Hartford and it is not, I assure you, in Windsor. The campus straddles the border between Hartford and West Hartford, with the main entrance just inside the latter. Is that what you meant to write? West Hartford also hosts St. Joseph's, a small teaching campus, and a branch of UConn, but it's really not a college town - it's one of the ten largest communities in the state by population, and solidly upper-middle class at the median. The campuses aren't central to town life by any stretch. What West Hartford does have, though, is lots of Jews. My 1st grade class: on Yom Kippur, of 22 kids, 6 were in school.
East Hartford, on the other side of the capital, is definitely a working class suburb.
Bloomfield, directly north of Hartford, has a very substantial middle class black population - probably one of the most integrated suburbs in the state.
Windsor, likewise - fun fact from Wikipedia: "Windsor was one of a handful of towns in the country where, in the United States Census, 2000, median income for black households ($64,159) was larger than white households ($63,624). "
New Britain, southwest of West Harford, has Central Ct State, which I'm confident rivals the size of U of H, but both school and small city are decidedly working class.
Overall, I agree with your assessment.

[Paul]

Great map once again, but I'm going to repeat my earlier comment about the misguided coloring scheme. The very dark shades of green and purple used for 20+% come way too close to two barely distinguishable shades of black and are hard to tell apart unless you look closely and squint a little. Since a really dark purple county is the extreme opposite of a really dark green county, they shouldn't be so hard to tell apart!

Nick, how about either using a continuum that uses the 15% colors (that are very different) for 20+ and shifts everything one shade to down and uses a really pale green/purple that's almost white for the close counties --- they'd be hard to tell apart, but that's OK, because the results there are close and the closeness should be indicated by the coloring. Think red -> purple <- blue where dark red and dark blue don't look like black.

[ikl]

Um, I think that we now have a strong pattern that really rural (as opposed to small cities) New England goes for Obama. Not everywhere and not always by a large margin. But it is a pretty clear trend now in CT, MA, NH and Maine. Large working class towns (with factories or mills) often go Clinton, but everywhere else trends toward Obama. Notice that rural areas of "greater New England" such as MN also follow this pattern.

[Matt]

Hey! I grew up in NW Connecticut and I can assure you there are many less educated folks and swamp yankees, but there are also a LOT of smart folks, semi-retired New Yorkers and celebrities in them thar hills. Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Tom Brokaw, Meryl Streep, Dick Ebersol, Kevin Bacon, Susan Saint James, Whoopie, Jacques Pepin. You know, poor dummies. I know that they vote because my mom runs into them at the polls.
I should look into where they dig up this data, but I can tell you that the working class rubs elbows with some high falutin' types in Litchfield County, and a lot of high falutin' tax money goes into some of the best schools in the state. That's why I am now smart enough to read this blog.
Thanks for the beautiful maps. I love this stuff.

[Dan]

Waterbury is the key. The rest of the Naugatuck Valley Region (my father: It's like going back 50 years in time) is full of conservative Dems, and Waterbury is the main city of the region. Yet Obama won it by a small margin. That, and his big win in New Haven, which has nothing to do with Yale's presence but more to do with an enthusiastic black population, gave him the state. New Haven's turnout was also huge, especially compared with Bridgeport and Hartford, so Obama took it.