I am still watching for the final voting tallies to be reached. One of the annoying things about the way the vote comes in is that is generally leaves the impression on election night that the Republican presidential candidate has fared better in the popular vote than he in fact has due to the late counting of votes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, all of which are Democratic bastions.
So as of today, I see that Obama's margin is up to 4.1 million votes. (Right now the vote is at 51% to 48% -- or more precisely 50.77% to 47.54% -- if Romney slips just a bit more to below 47.5% he will officially have won the support of 47%, which would be sweet indeed.) And Obama has now topped 64 million votes -- he is still down 5 million votes from 2008, but it is a far cry from the claims one heard on election day of Obama being down by 9 - 10 million votes. I am not sure how many votes there are left to count, but it seems likely that Obama will continue to add to his margin. As I have noted previously, it is pretty clear that Obama's overall vote count has been substantially hurt by Hurricane Sandy. If you look at the vote totals for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (which were the sixth, eleventh, and twelfth most pro-Obama states in the country) they were down by 19%, 12%, and 5% respectively. (See column J in the attached link.) It looks to me like this accounts for about 1 million likely Obama voters who were not able to get to the polls.
I was curious to see how Obama's white vote held up this time around. There were places in 2008 where he performed improbably well like Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and North Dakota the last time around. Alas, this time his performance in those states eroded a great deal. (I don't think this was shocking given the performance of the economy over the last four years -- voters who went against the grain in 2008 probably did not see enough upside to keep them moving in Obama's direction -- throw in the incredible vilification to which Obama was subjected during this time and the general erosion in his rural support and the outcome does not seem at all surprising. I think 2016 will give the Dems another chance in at least a few of these places.)
In 2008, Obama prevailed among white voters in 18 states plus the District of Columbia. Sadly, I can't give quite the same analysis as I did in 2008 due to the elimination of exit polling in several states. But it appears to me that Obama won the white vote in 12 states plus DC this time around. He took 91% of the overall vote in DC, 70% in Hawaii, 63% in Rhode Island, and 59% in Delaware -- none of these states were exit polled, but it is safe to say that he won the white vote in three of them -- Delaware, which had 20% minority voters in 2008 may not have quite made it.
In the states that were exit polled, Obama prevailed among white voters in the following -- these states also had pretty noteworthy gender gaps among its white voters:
White Vote for Obama White Women v. White Men Gap
Vermont: 66% 72 - 59% 13%
Massachusetts: 57% 63 - 50 13%
Maine: 57% 64 - 49 15%
Oregon: 54% 57 - 51 6%
Washington: 53% 55 - 50 5%
Connecticut: 51% 57 - 44 13%
New Hampshire: 51% 56 - 46 10%
Iowa: 51% 58 - 42 16%
New York: 49% 55 - 43 12%
I continue to find the scope of the gender gap in places like New York, New England, and Iowa (versus say Oregon and Washington) to be really interesting. I don't have an explanation for it, but it strikes me as an interesting thesis topic.
(And it's stuff like this that makes me really regret the lack of fifty state data.)
I am going to continue to comb through the data to see what else might be of interest.
What do you all think?
- Sir Charles (It says Stephen's name, but that's because I am once again found wanting technologically. But I did make Ian disappear.)
