Mapping the Immigration Vote/IMPORTANT UPDATE

IMPORTANT UPDATE: For any Wall Street Journal types who might be reading this site, producing the vivid colors in the above map cost over $7.5 million dollars in undisclosed funding, and required 36 hours of constant access to the latest generation of quantum supercomputers. I'm not sure where the money came from, but Michelle Malkin keeps the computers in her garage. FYI.

For everyone smarter than a WSJ contributor, the above map was created using an Electoral College Calculator found on the following site: http://www.grayraven.com/ec/.

I used it to reproduce the State by State results of today's Senate 46-53 cloture vote on the Immigration bill to see if any interesting trends might be revealed from reviewing the data in this format.

The Key is as follows:

Red States- Both Senators voted "No" on the cloture vote.
Yellow States- These delegation split, with one Senator voting on each side.
Blue States- Both Senators voted "Yes" on the cloture vote.

On first blush, this reveals some interesting things:

*A plurality of States, 18, saw their delegations vote "No". 17 states were "undecided" and only 15 states saw their delegations vote "Yes"

*Discounting "undecided" states, the map does not look all that dissimilar from the electoral college results of the 2000 and 2004 election, in that this vote reveals a similar dynamic with regard to voting behavior between the South/Midwest and the Coasts.

*Although Red "Opposed" States carried a plurality in terms of States carried, the Blue "Yes" States actually carried a plurality in the electoral college, although not enough to have reached 270.

*Some of the state by state results are counter-intuitive. The 4 southern border states split. Who is right? Cornyn and Hutchison or Kyl and McCain?

*The state of Florida sticks out as the only deep South state which went "Blue".

*Are voters in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire really in sync with voters in Arkansas, Mississippi and South Carolina? According to the map, they could fairly be lumped together.

*Does the map tend to reveal certain Senators that are out of touch with the voters in their own state? Arkansas has two Democratic senators. It split. Mississippi has 2 Republican senators. It split. These senators can't all be reflecting their constituents on this issue.

*Look at all the Yellow states in the Agricultural West and Upper Midwest, that would have been "Red States" for purposes of the 2000 and 2004 Presidential election? Does this show the extent of Agribusinesses lobbying power?

These are just some perfunctory thoughts as I look at the map for the first time. Perhaps some of you see some other interesting trends emerging here. Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments.

Note: Thanks to Slublog for helping me incorporate the image into the site in a form that was a lot nicer looking than the mess I uploaded. Thanks, Slu!

posted by Jack M. at 02:06 PM

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