Showing posts with label Red state advantage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Red state advantage. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

One man, one vote? Not in the United States



I got this response to my last post, in which I claimed that the Republican Party has a structural advantage in elections, given the nature of the Electoral College--which no other democracy on Earth has. He said:

12 of the 13 smallest states (3-4 electoral votes) are almost invariably non-competitive, and ignored, in presidential elections. Six regularly vote Republican (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota),, and six regularly vote Democratic (Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, and DC) in presidential elections.

I suppose this is supposed to refute my claim. And for all I know this is the sort of refutation promoted in the right wing blogosphere.

However it only shows how much trouble most people have understanding statistics--especially when it isn't a black and white story. The reader's statement may be true as far as it goes but it doesn't change the fact that it takes more than one Democratic voter, on average, to counter the vote of one Republican voter.

What propagandists do is take advantage of humans' "confirmation bias" where we start with a conclusion then cherry pick the facts--or accept fake facts from people who claim they're members of our tribe--and then arrive at our foregone conclusion.

And this is a prime example.

I went to Wikipedia and looked up their entries on the states, and on which are red, blue, and purple (swing states), based on the results of the last several presidential elections.

Here's what I found:

All the red states, taken together, have a total population of 109 million people distributed across 22 states.

All the blue states, taken together, have a total population of 150 million people distributed across 21 states.

All the purple (swing) states, taken together, have a total population of 48 million people.

The averrage Republican state has a population of 4.9 million people, while the average Democratic state has a population of 7.1 million people (and the swing states average 6.9 million people).

That's a humongous imbalance. Yet Republicans win presidential elections, because the Electoral College favors them. all else being equal. This is due to the fact that the small states get more electors per citizen than the big states get. And it's not a small difference. A Montana Republican's vote counts for more than three California Democrats' votes.

Here's the raw data, with the states ranked in order of just how thoroughly they are in one camp or the other--thus Utah is the reddest state and Massachusetts the bluest (even though it sent a Republican to the Senate recently):

Red states--ranked by degree of "redness"

state name (redness) population

rank / size (in millions)

Blue states

Purple states


[sorry this doesn't appear as the
table I'd created--formatting issues
with Google I guess for those who
don't speak fluent HTML at least]
Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)