New Hampshire update

Much has happened since my last post from 3 days ago. In the previous post, I demonstrated that in the New Hampshire Republican primary, as the number of voters per precinct increases, Mr. Romney's share of the vote increases while Dr. Paul's share of the vote decreases. I first want to address some of the questions and comments related to this post.

Comment. I can't see images or images have poor resolution
Answer. See this.

Comment. You are seeing this trend because Mr. Romney does better in urban and wealthy areas.
Answer. I cannot (yet) answer this directly, but if I can obtain county-level (or better yet, precinct-level) income data, I could address the second part of that comment. Regarding the urban Mitt-island effect, the Manchester data appears to be inconsistent with the statement, "Mr. Romney does better in urban areas." Take a look at this map of the various wards for Manchester. It appears to show that wards with smaller areas favor Dr. Paul (he won the two wards surrounded by red lines), while wards with larger areas favor Mr. Romney (he doubled Dr. Paul in the 3 wards surrounded by orange lines). Maybe someone from Manchester could specifically identify a demographic effect which would explain these rather remarkable differences in support, given the close proximity. One possible explanation is that Mr. Romney did extremely well in suburban areas. Again, it would be very nice if I could obtain precinct-level income data for New Hampshire!

Comment. Your regression fit doesn't look too good.
Answer. Whether a straight line is the best fit of the data is short-sighted. Obviously, there is a strong correlation between the difference in Mr. Romney's support and Dr. Paul's support and precinct size in 11 of the 12 counties! Statewide, the correlation is 0.9!

Moving forward with New Hampshire, I plan to analyze the data from the 2008 primary as well as look at additional precinct-level or county-level information that I have yet to collect, including population, registered Republicans, geographic area, income, property values, etc. If anyone knows where I can find some of this information, I would be thrilled to get some help.

My next few posts will take a look at Iowa, which is a different animal altogether. However, some preliminary analyses are pretty interesting. For example, when looking at counties with an average population of more than 2000 per precinct, which applies to more than half of Iowa's population, Mr. Romney received 28% of the vote while Mr. Santorum and Dr. Paul were virtually tied with 22% of the vote. In counties with less than 2000 people per precinct, Mr. Romney received only 19.5% of the vote, behind Dr. Paul with 20.3% and Mr. Santorum with 27.3%. I intend to find an explanation for this.

Precinct-Level Data for IA, ME, MN, NV and NH

So far in this primary season, we have seen caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, Minnesota, Colorado and Maine. There have been primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Missouri. Because these events are organized and run by each state's Republican Party leadership, there is an incredible amount of heterogeneity between the different states.

This makes things difficult for someone who wants to obtain precinct-level data for every single precinct in each of those 9 states, but that is my task. After some painstaking googling, and a decent quantity of repetitive keystrokes and mouse-clicks, I am now confident that I have ALL of the publicly available precinct-level data for Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada and New Hampshire. Finally! And yes, I know that Maine's results should be adjusted after the Feb 18 caucuses.

Okay, so I can't confirm or deny (yet) the claims of the poster at Daily Paul regarding South Carolina, but I can look at some other states and see if there's a similar trend. In other words, as precinct size increases, does Dr. Paul fare increasingly worse or Mr. Romney fare increasingly better? That is the only question I am asking for now.

Because each state has a unique set of considerations, I think it's best if I consider the results from each state separately, and I won't be able to do that until later this weekend. However, I must give a teaser: the early results appear to be VERY interesting!

For example, about 43% of the 6520 precincts from these 5 states had 20 or fewer votes. Dr. Paul won 20.5% of those precincts, while Mr. Romney only won 19.3% and Mr. Santorum won 27.2% (Mr. Gingrich won 6.7%). These precincts represent a total of 25,324 voters, or 5.5%.

Now let's consider the 10.5% of precincts with more than 100 voters. Dr. Paul won 20.1% of these precincts, Mr. Romney took a whopping 56.9%, Mr. Santorum dropped to 20.7% and Mr. Gingrich captured a paltry 1.5%. These precincts represent an incredible 318,741 voters, or 69.9%.

Hmm ... just a guess, but I think that the Santorum camp may find this preliminary data to be fairly interesting.

My first state-specific post will deal with New Hampshire, and the graph below is certainly intriguing. It shows the relationship between vote percentage and precinct size for both Dr. Paul and Mr. Romney in New Hampshire.