There has been a lot of talk about Barack Obama’s tax plan this political season. The biggest question seems to be, who will see their taxes increase? Well we decided to take a closer look at WHERE in the U.S. people will be most affected by the Obama’s tax increase.

First, to clarify, families with an income above $250,000 dollars would see their tax rates return the levels from the 1990’s. According to the Obama campaign, this tax increase will affect about 2% of the population.

So where are these people who earn $250,000? Are they from Republican or Democratic states? Are they concentrated or dispersed?

Since the US Census only provides data for incomes of $200,000 or more, I decided to look at house prices. An individual or family earning $250,000 a year could afford a home valued at about $1 million so we thought that, aside from the obvious margin of error, homes valued at $1 million or more would be a good indicator of who would be affected by Obama’s tax increase. The U.S. Census 2007 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates provides the number of $1 Million+ Owner Occupied Housing Units by state and county. After uploading that data to Finder!, we played around with some maps in Maker!and found some interesting patterns.

See the datasets (states, counties) and map.

Most of the states that had the most $1 Million + Homes were no surprise, however a few were unexpected. Take a look…the first map shows the number of $1 Million + Homes per state as well as 50 counties with the most $1 Million + Homes and the second shows just the counties have the highest number of $1 Million + Homes.

See the datasets (states, counties) and map.

It’s interesting that some of the states with the most homes only have one county that appears in the top 50 list. These counties, such as King County, WA, Maricopa County, AZ, Fulton County, GA, Hennepin County, MN, and Cook County, Il, have more than a third of all of the $1 Million + Homes in their state.

See the datasets (states, counties) and map.

So we know where the people are. Now, how might that affect the election?

Let’s take a look at the most current presidential election polls from USA Election Polls. This map shows that many of the states with the highest percent of $1 Million + Homes are also leaning toward Obama in this year’s election. In other words, the states that have the highest percent of residents that earn over $250,000 and therefore will be most affected by Obama’s tax increases are in states that are voting for Obama.

Of course, a few of those states are highly contested states including Florida, Virginia, and Colorado. Why is that? Well, its important to point out that the percent of million dollar home owners is only around 2% so they are not going to have a huge impact on an election. However, this demographic may be more likely to vote in an election than those earning less money.

See the datasets for states and polls.

The pattern that million dollar home owners tend to live in democratic areas, is also evident at the county level. This map shows the top 50 counties based on who they voted for in the 2004 presidential election. Of the 50 counties, 30 voted for Kerry and 16 voted for Bush. Most of those counties that voted for Bush are in Southern California, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois. All but Texas voted for Kerry and are in no threat from turning red this year. Of course, taxes did not play as big a role in the election in 2004.

See the dataset and map.

So why is the McCain campaign making such a big issue of the Obama tax plan? Since it will affect mostly people in blue states, maybe they hope to change some minds there. However it seems that such a scenario is unlikely even though people who earn more money do tend to vote Republican. Exit polls from 2004 show that those who earned $50,000 or more voted Republican.

Perhaps the Obama tax plan, which claims it will give tax breaks to those earning less than $200,000, may persuade some of the 98% + of those in the red states who would qualify to vote for Obama. By appealing to the $200,000 earners, maybe Obama is attempting to raise the democratic appeal to income levels above $50,000. It will be interesting to see what happens on Tuesday, especially to see how the richest counties vote this time around.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Much has been made during the 2008 Presidential Campaign about the errors John McCain has made about geography. He made a reference to Czechoslovakia still existing and also said that the countries of Iraq and Pakistan border one another.

These are major world geography errors that McCain has been heavily criticized about, but he has been good about not making geographical errors about his own country. These errors belong to Barack Obama, the other candidate for President. Obama has on several occasions during the 08 Campaign made errors about geography throughout the U.S. including calling a city/state he was visiting by the wrong name. He has done this on three different occasions in Sunrise, FL, Sioux Falls, SD, and the state of Wyoming. He also was recorded saying that there were 57 states in the USA, that Kentucky was closer to Arkansas than Illinois, and referred to Brownsville, Texas as Brownville, Texas. The map below shows the locations of where Obama has made Geographical Gaffes. The map can be found on Maker! at this link: Obama’s Geographical Gaffes, USA, 2008 Campaign.

These mistakes were probable mere slips of the tongues or occurred from being tired while campaigning. Not much should be made from the errors in my opinion, but since my work deals with geography I must say I’m a bit saddened.

Popularity: 14% [?]

With the rise of post-partisan Obama on the national political scene, there have been sporadic stories in the print and on-line media , in Op-Eds, on the cable-news/YouTube and in the blogs; of how some influential Republicans have turned into Obama supporters, the so called Obamacans, reverse of Reagan-Democrats. Of course, not everybody is buying into the Obamacan story, considering it as a media creation or part of chaos theory. However, the recent claims by McClatchy newspapers’s that their “…. computer analysis, incomplete due to the difficulty matching data from various campaign finance reports, found that hundreds of people who gave at least $200 to Bush’s 2004 campaign have donated to Obama”, caught our eye at FortiusOne.

So, if there indeed are Bush donors who now have become Obamacans, the data-team wanted to find out where they are spatially speaking. Below are the maps of our efforts showing locations of possible Obamacans in New York City and Washington D.C. Why use the term possible? Because what is mapped are the results based on spatial join and attribute join, the later being a variation of spatial join. And the accuracy of the results of such joins is subject to the limitations imposed by the accuracy of the original data (donor addresses) as well as limitations of the geocoding operation. More on this towards the end of this post. So what is mapped are donor address matches and not individual donors.

Attribute Join
The attribute join is based on an identifier “XY” constructed from the concatenation of X and Y location coordinates of the Bush-Cheney and Obama donors, where the X and Y location coordinates are obtained by geocoding donor addresses. The attribute join resulted in 250 records across the lower 48 states, mostly concentrated in major cities of North-East and West-Coast. The results are shown below for New York city (lower Manhattan) and Wash D.C., where blue circles represent Obama donors (1,415 in D.C. and 1,825 in New York city); red circles represent Bush-Cheney donors (294 in D.C. and 419 in New York). The purple squares colocated with Bush-Cheney red circles are the XY “attribute matches.” There were 32 such locations in D.C and New York City had 85.

New York City: “XY” attribute join of Bush-Cheney donors with Obama donors

Washington D.C.: “XY” attribute join of Bush-Cheney donors with Obama donors

Spatial Join
Yet another way was to carry out a “spatial” join between location of each Bush-Cheney donor with all of the co-located Obama donors, resulting in more than 9,200 Bush-Cheney records colocated with more than 42,000 Obama records in the lower 48 states. The results are shown below for New York City (lower Manhattan) and Wash D.C., where again blue circles represent Obama donors, red circles represent Bush-Cheney donors, and the purple circles with varying sizes represent count of Obama donors that are colocated with each of the “spatially” joined Bush-Cheney donor. There were more than 1,500 Obama donors colocating with 248 Bush-Cheney donors in D.C. while the comparable figures for NY city are more than 2,030 Obama donors colocating with 303 Bush-Cheney donors.

Bush-Cheney donor locations spatially joined with Obama donors in NY City

Bush-Cheney donor locations spatially joined with Obama donors in Wash D.C.

Donor Data
You may find/download the mapped as well as other supporting datasets from the Finder! by using the key-word “Obamacans“. The supporting datasets also include spatial join of all Bush-Cheney donors for each of the Obama donors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15% [?]

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’.

Popularity: 12% [?]