Dataset of the Day: Obama Faces Familiar Landscape

After a marathon of 50 plus primaries/caucuses while raising record sums of campaign money and more than a year and half of campaigning that had more twists and turns than a roller coaster, Obama clinched the nomination after crossing the threshold of requisite number of delegates on 3 Jun, 2008 and received the full endorsement last Saturday, from his once bitter rival, Clinton. No doubt, for a young 46 year old black gifted candidate and a one term senator from Illinois this is a cause for celebration and a little R&R. However, the path-breaking presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party cannot afford to rest on his laurels.

And why is that? Let’s look at the landscape of state level wins/losses. The 3-d map below shows the share of Obama vote in the lower 48 states. The height of raised polygons in the shape of the states with shades of blue/purple and green represent Obama’s share of votes, while the dark red/brown and beige/wheat hues represent Clinton states.

Considering the map above, Obama campaign would do well to realize the challenges that they now face in the race for the White House, both in the states that Obama lost to Clinton (CA, NY, PA, OH, FL, AR, TN, IN etc.), and the states that he won handily (SC, LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, NC, MT, NC, NE, ND, ID, OR, WA, VA, MD, MO, UT etc.). Obama campaign will have to compete with McCain in all those states that are shown in shades of green. It also does not bode well for him that the states that he won in the primary (blue and purple) traditionally vote for a Republican president.

The difficulties he will encounter become visible when one analyzes the landscape of voting patterns in the primaries at the sub-state level such as counties and congressional districts. The map below was constructed from dozens of data-sets available on the Finder!, while the data for the map was compiled from more than 45 on- and off-line sources.

Much of the county level data came from election divisions of each state’s office of SOS (Secretary of State), while the congressional district level data was scraped from from the mother of all election information sites, TheGreenPapers.Com and a few state Democratic parties and news papers. The map shows share of Obama votes by county and by congressional districts, a hybrid born out of the necessity of geocoding the default data available for different jurisdictions in the lower 48 states.

The sub-state level primaries voting patterns with bluish hues are where Obama did well. The areas with the orange and red hues where Clinton did well are the so called “Guns and Religion strongholds“. With Obama’s 50 state strategy, these are the same places where Obama campaign will have to spend enough time and money for the general election campaign. As is apparent from the map, the the rival campaigns will compete with Obama in blue hued areas, at the same time some of the independent 527s could swift-boat Obama by playing up Obama’s pastor problems in the red/orange hued Clinton country. In brief, what Obama campaign has experienced so far is just a primer to the challenges they will have to face during the General Election campaign.

All of the data for these maps, including county and congressional level data is available on Finder!, except for North Dakota and Wyoming, the really red states that appear blue in these maps, mainly because Obama’s win in the democratic primaries and whose respective SOS (Secretary of State) offices have not posted the primary results data yet. For the rest, you may search/download/map the state/county and congressional district level data on Finder! using tags such as ‘elections’, ‘primary’, ‘presidential primary’, ‘democrats’ and ‘politics’.