OTL Election maps resources thread

Utgard96

Utgard96

It strikes me that Oregon and Colorado seem quite similar politically. You've got the large city that's sort of disconnected from the rest of the state, the two isolated hippie and/or college towns that form the main bastions of the Democratic Party outside the big city, a few blue-leaning rural areas with tourist-heavy economies (though the ski towns of Colorado form a larger voting bloc than the Oregon coast seems to), and then oceans of suburbia and rural areas that are solidly red. Still some major differences, obviously - for one, there's no Colorado Springs equivalent in Oregon (making the state as a whole a fair bit bluer), and for another, Portland isn't the state capital.

EDIT:

big-click said:
Oregon and Texas are the only two states with total bans on rent control, a law which is nebulous enough to put regulatory initiatives like the relo ordinance under legal threat.
Click to expand...

Doesn't Washington State also ban rent control, or do they allow it in fringe cases?
 

big-click

Utgard96 said:
It strikes me that Oregon and Colorado seem quite similar politically. You've got the large city that's sort of disconnected from the rest of the state, the two isolated hippie and/or college towns that form the main bastions of the Democratic Party outside the big city, a few blue-leaning rural areas with tourist-heavy economies (though the ski towns of Colorado form a larger voting bloc than the Oregon coast seems to), and then oceans of suburbia and rural areas that are solidly red. Still some major differences, obviously - for one, there's no Colorado Springs equivalent in Oregon (making the state as a whole a fair bit bluer), and for another, Portland isn't the state capital.
Click to expand...

Some good observations there. The similarities are probably accentuated by the states' similar histories - relatively recent white settlement, domination by extractive industry followed by recent economic diversification, countercultural types attracted in the 60s and 70s due to natural beauty and outdoor recreation. Do you think it's mostly the political weight of Colorado Springs that's kept CO "swingier" than Oregon? How politically powerful are eastern Colorado's farmers and ranchers? Their equivalent in Oregon are pretty marginal, with even the state GOP being dominated by suburbanite homeowner's association types.

Doesn't Washington State also ban rent control, or do they allow it in fringe cases?
Click to expand...

Looks like you're right. I did a bit of campaigning for HB 2004 and we always said it was just Oregon and Texas. Maybe somebody was misinformed, or maybe somebody knew it would sound worse if we were in a class of our own with big bad red poor-urban-planning Texas.
 
Utgard96

Utgard96

big-click said:
Some good observations there. The similarities are probably accentuated by the states' similar histories - relatively recent white settlement, domination by extractive industry followed by recent economic diversification, countercultural types attracted in the 60s and 70s due to natural beauty and outdoor recreation. Do you think it's mostly the political weight of Colorado Springs that's kept CO "swingier" than Oregon? How politically powerful are eastern Colorado's farmers and ranchers? Their equivalent in Oregon are pretty marginal, with even the state GOP being dominated by suburbanite homeowner's association types.
Click to expand...
I think the east is fairly desolate, what with being the high plains - IIRC they only get like two or three state house seats.
 

big-click

Here are the 2014 and 2012 legislative elections, which I've put behind these handy spoiler tags so as not to clutter the thread:

Oregon House of Representatives election, 2012

ukV6xAd.png


Oregon House of Representatives election, 2014

tJhbouV.png

Oregon Senate election, 2012

iBEmfL1.png


Oregon Senate election, 2014

DYKIlrF.png

Due to regional polarization, the legislature is seriously inelastic. Four seats changed hands in 2012 when the map was redrawn, three in 2014, and only one in 2016. Other than the GOP Senate pickup in 2016, all were Democratic gains - the state is tilting bluer as the urban and suburban areas grow. Hillsboro has trended more Democratic over the past few years, while the coast trended sharply Republican in 2016 (probably as a side effect of Trump doing better than usual for the GOP there); other than that it's hard to see major changes.

Other observations:

- The GOP has been contesting fewer and fewer seats, especially in the Portland metro area, as it transitions into being a permanent minority party.
- On two occasions, third-party candidates earned over 40% of the vote (the 2012 32nd District Constitution Party nominee with 41%, and the 2014 25th District Independent Party nominee with 43%). In both cases, the election was only contested by one major party. Someday, this is going to backfire on somebody.
 
Last edited:
Thande

Thande

Donor
big-click said:
Here are the most recent elections in (you guessed it) Oregon. What state should I do next? I've seen maps for MN, WA, VA, and NJ in here, are there states folks would like to see covered?
Click to expand...
Really good work! The only thing I would say is (I have seen this myself with doing legislature maps) is that there is such a variation in size between urban and rural districts that it might be better to do an inset zoomed-in map for the Portland area in this case - the 'only one major party' star with all the green lines obscures the map a bit, but with an inset you could put a star on each one. The alternative if you don't want to do that is to do a smaller version of the star (e.g. a 5-pixel yellow cross) for the small districts and then write below that that equals the same as the star.

As far as other legislatures go, we've never done many for the South, so it would be interesting to see somewhere like Alabama or South Carolina.
 

big-click

Good call on the inset, I ought to go back and make one. I did consider drawing a bigger basemap but it would have been very time-consuming for not much gained in most of the state; not sure why I didn't think of an inset.

And a Southern election series could be fun. I'm interested to see if there are more uncontested seats down there or not.
 
Thande

Thande

Donor
big-click said:
Good call on the inset, I ought to go back and make one. I did consider drawing a bigger basemap but it would have been very time-consuming for not much gained in most of the state; not sure why I didn't think of an inset.

And a Southern election series could be fun. I'm interested to see if there are more uncontested seats down there or not.
Click to expand...
Yeah, several times I've done a legislature map (or occasionally for English councils) I think "I don't want to do an inset, surely if I just make the whole thing bigger" and then I realise I've underestimated the size difference and it ends up being far too big. Insets are probably the lesser of two evils.

The South used to be known for having more unopposed elections than the rest of the country, but it'll be interesting to see if that's still true or not.
 
Last edited:
Thande

Thande

Donor
Utgard96 said:
and for another, Portland isn't the state capital.
Click to expand...
This tendency in US states has bugged me for a while so I made a map. It's actually a less pronounced tendency than I thought, but obviously the few cases of 'some random town in the middle of nowhere' tend to enlarge themselves in the memory.

US capitals.png
 
Alex Richards

Alex Richards

Donor
So approximately equal numbers for the largest city and a city outside the top three.

I'm somewhat amazed a state as small as Vermont can manage to have 3 cities larger than its state capital.
 
Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

Alex Richards said:
So approximately equal numbers for the largest city and a city outside the top three.

I'm somewhat amazed a state as small as Vermont can manage to have 3 cities larger than its state capital.
Click to expand...
Nicky99 said:
And apparently it isn't even the 4th largest either, there are 4 cities larger than Montpelier, and a bunch of towns too.
Click to expand...
It helps that Montpelier is a tiny, tiny town that was only chosen because it was near the geographic center of Vermont. (Perhaps the most stereotypically American but still accurate way to state its smallness is the fact that it is not large enough to rate a McDonald's franchise.)
 

Zimmerwald1915

Banned
Thande said:
This tendency in US states has bugged me for a while so I made a map. It's actually a less pronounced tendency than I thought, but obviously the few cases of 'some random town in the middle of nowhere' tend to enlarge themselves in the memory.

View attachment 365571
Click to expand...
A lot of American states are actually drawn such that they're bounded on either the north and south or the east and west by their major towns, with the capital being somewhere in the middle. Think Missouri, or Pennsylvania, or New York, or Virginia (before West Virginia split) or Tennessee.
 
Thande

Thande

Donor
Peyton said:
Does anybody have blank maps of the Missouri House of Representatives and Senate?
Click to expand...
Not editable ones. I normally have to make state legislature maps from scratch by tracing from the Openstates website or the pdf maps erratically put out by the legislatures themselves, though I lucked out in the recent case of NJ because someone had already made one for Wikipedia.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top