So the other day, I commented on the fact that Leffingwell had been endorsed by 50 Democratic precinct chairs and how cool would it be to have those on a map to see which areas of town their represented. Being a numbers and data visualization nerd, I have to say I was really excited to see a filled in map from the Leffingwell campaign land in my inbox today! Awesome!
Looking at it, I noticed a pattern. So I pulled up the 2003, 2006, and 2008 City of Austin turnout maps from the city demographer's (Ryan Robinson rocks) website. That's the two Will Wynn mayoral elections as well as last spring's election when Leffingwell got re-elected.
As you'll see in the map below (click to open a much larger 1 MB version), those endorsements track most of the highest turnout precincts year after year. The purple represents turnout rates of 40%+ for 2003, 30%+ for 2006, and 20%+ in 2008.
Thanks to Cogitamus for this map. Note, this doesn't include the caucuses (which are still being reported largely in Obama's favor and are going to end up showing that Obama won the delegate count in TX). This is just the results from the "primary" portion of the election:
Possibly more instructive, is the current Senate District national delegate map. The following is courtesy of the awesome people at the Austin Chronicle who posted it.
In the process of analyzing races in my home area, I have been putting together some maps in order to visualize what happened in Tuesday's elections. I have come to some preliminary conclusions, but I'd prefer at this time to reserve comment and allow people to look at some of these basic maps in order to draw their own conclusions. In this effort I decided to do some maps of the entire state in addition to the maps of my area to share with BOR readers.
A friend recently forwarded me a link to a website that links a public database of political donations with Google Maps.
I searched 78705, the zip near campus in Austin, and unfortuately it didn't list my donation to the DNC. Then I read the notes from the creator:
--Rrealize that due to limitations in the geocoding as well as my data source this system does NOT work very well for zip codes representing a small population and contributions under $200 are not required to be present in the public databases.
--My data source is limited to contributions only to the two major parties during the 2004 Presidential election.
