A Look At Some Election Data

So, like the political nerd/junkie I am, I decided to look at this NY Times election data. If you have time, I suggest you do so too. Anyway, here are some of the more interesting findings:

The county in Florida with the highest % of voters casting a ballot for President Obama was…

 

…Gadsden County, which has me a little surprised. Most of you may know Gadsden as the subject of that Essence article, but they got out the vote for the president at a rate unsurpassed by any county in my fair state (71 percent). Broward – my home county, which I routinely and proudly call the most Democratic county in Florida – was second (67 percent). As one would expect, college students and South Floridians…also known as the smart people…won the state for the president.

It’s been discussed that President Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Not as many people have noted that he won 73 percent of the Asian vote.

I can’t see Native Americans voting for Romney, so I think it’s safe to say that the president (and maybe the Democrats as a whole) has all of the minorities in his corner. Considering that minorities are now a majority in the U.S., this spells well-deserved trouble for the Republicans. As I said last week, it’s only going to get better worse. You just can’t hate people and then expect them to like you.

The president won fewer young voters than he did in 2008.

I tried to tell people then that a lot of younger white voters voted for the president in ’08 because it a) was the cool thing to do or b) to rebel against their parents. Well, the novelty wore off. It’s up to President Obama and the Democrats to give younger voters substantial reasons to vote for them. The Democrats have to counter the conservative turn that many of them will make as they age.

Everyone knows that neither Romney nor Ryan could pull their home state. How about this: neither of them could even pull their own county.

This is just too funny. How the [heck] do you go home again and look your closest neighbors in the eye when you know they didn’t vote for you? That’s got to be a shameful feeling.

Mitt Romney won college graduates.

Now, this is slightly surprising. Say what you want about this next statement, but it’s true: more educated people tend to be more liberal. It’s a fact. However, Mittens got the baccalaureates out. This said, the president mopped the floor with Mittens amongst those of us with graduate degrees.

Married people voted for Mittens. Single people voted for the president.

Guess what? People are eschewing marriage much more than they were in the past. Advantage, president and Democrats.

You really want to know who got the president re-elected? Homosexual people.

The two candidates were tied amongst heterosexual people. However, our much-maligned sisters and brothers voted for the president by a 3-1 margin. That’s why there will be no UHauls going to 1600 in January.

Yet another reason we need to just let people live. They are amongst the most marginalized of groups, but they have a huge hand in deciding everything. That can be said for almost any minority, so we would be well served to learn a lesson the Republicans can’t seem to grasp: we’re all in this together.