Monday, February 17, 2025

An extremely detailed map of the 2024 election

What happened?

What was the precinct-level vote in 2024?


Click here: Unlocked NYT article

The New York Times makes this report available.

My main purpose in today's post is to remind readers of an extraordinary internet tool, these precinct-level maps. The second is to praise/thank The New York Times.

The news business is in trouble. Ad revenue is way down, swallowed up by Meta, Google, and other aggregators who rework the content created by others and then micro-target it to customers, collecting the majority of the potential ad revenue. Newspapers will survive by persuading readers to buy subscriptions to pay the cost of reporters talking to news sources, writing it up, getting it edited and distributed. The New York Times has about 11.5 million subscribers, a majority of whom are digital-only. Real news is expensive. Donald Trump calls the newspaper "the failing New York Times." The U.S. is better off if its news institutions survive.  I subscribe, which is why I can share this article -- one of the benefits of being a subscriber.

Some states and counties are slow to upload data, but readers in my home country and in most battleground states can see what happened in 2024, and with a click compare it to the 2020 election. Jackson County, Oregon is one of the places with a full data upload.

2024 Results 


Shift from 2020 to 2024

Clicking on the map brings the detail into closer focus down to individual precincts, showing how powerful is the "neighborhood effect." Ashland, Oregon is a college town, but its politics and culture are better understood as a place of prosperous, well-educated people seeking a simpatico environment that emphasises livability. One sees pedestrian shoppers  and tourists here. Real estate prices are 30 percent higher than the county median. Here is a precinct on a hillside with views across the valley to the east. The other Ashland precincts have similar voting results.



Jacksonville is a small haven of people seeking a village atmosphere of history and culture. This is an old gold-rush village boom-town four miles west of Medford. One sees pedestrians here, too.
 

Jackson County as a whole voted for Trump. Precincts outside of city limits are overwhelmingly red. My farm is eight miles from Medford and five miles from Central Point. My general assumption is that every single male I see doing agricultural work, or in an agricultural context anywhere near my farm, is a Trump supporter. I won't be far wrong.


To the east of my farm, in a mixed exurban/industrial area, is the area that most benefits from the social programs supported by Democrats. It is among the reddest parts of the county. White City is an unincorporated but urbanized area. It has a concentration of poverty, disability, drug and alcohol services. The precincts surrounding it voted for Trump 77- 21 percent, 75-22 percent, and 76-21 percent. MAGA voters want something other than the social safety-net Ashland Democrats support. They use it. They don't value it.


The maps encourages exploration of border-town precincts, battleground state precincts, and old neighborhoods. The presumption many readers will have, that Cambridge, Massachusetts is bright blue, is correct. That is Harvard Yard in the center of the image:



Find your own neighborhood. Explore. It is made possible because great newspapers still exist, and they still exist because subscribers still exist.

Here are some additional links: 


2016 election map 




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Sunday, February 16, 2025

Some Sundays aren't easy.

Bill Thorndike was public-spirited, community-minded, and generous.

Bill died Saturday of a heart attack.

I got calls and texts: "Did you hear the terrible news? Bill Thorndike died."  

The sad news brings us back to what is important. Character is important. The choices and priorities Bill had were important. Bill was a good guy who did good things, willingly and generously.  

Bill spent decades building social capital -- the glue and energy that make a place work better. He was on committees, and frequently led them. He was tireless. Hospital board. Education board. Government boards. Nonprofit boards. Social club boards. Business boards. Financial boards. He was a builder. He built community organizations. He was good at it.

People are shocked and rattled that Bill died. Too sudden. Too soon. We feel grief, but loss, too. We are all better off because of Bill and how he lived his life. 

The bell tolls for us. The community is poorer now. 


Bill, with wife Angela, at the University Club

Bill, with Tobias Read, Oregon's Secretary of State




Bill, signing his submission to the voters pamphlet urging county offices be non-partisan



Bill, preparing to make a public presentation with two former county commissioners, Sue Kupillas and David Gilmour




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Saturday, February 15, 2025

FAFO: MAGA on Medicaid

     “A lot of MAGA is on Medicaid. If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. You just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.”
 
          Steve Bannon, being interviewed on Fox

Bannon
MAGA voters will find out what they voted for.

A political irony of the past decade has been that the people most adamant about repealing the Affordable Care Act -- "Obamacare" -- are the people who most needed and used the program. The working-class exurban and rural poor, who live in bright red districts, which are the places where Medicaid expansion was most beneficial. Small rural hospitals in those areas avoided bankruptcy and closure because the ACA allowed partial reimbursement for services that would otherwise be uncollectible and unpaid. Americans avoided medical bankruptcy.

Oregon contained a particular irony. Rural eastern and southern Oregon was represented by a personable, well-spoken Republican, Greg Walden, who rose by seniority and fundraising prowess to be the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees health care legislation. His chairmanship made him part of GOP leadership. The GOP position was simple and clear: Obamacare is bad. The problem for Walden was that his district (which includes my home and farm) had more Medicaid recipients under the ACA than any other congressional district in the country represented by a Republican, and more than all but three congressional districts in the country. 

There is a pattern here in Oregon and nationwide. The reddest areas are the ones with the highest Medicaid enrollment:

Willamette Week

Looking ahead to Medicaid cuts, the most Republican districts are where the highest premium increases will occur:

KFF.org

Everyone wants to cut "waste, fraud, and abuse." There is casual, sloppy talk that works in campaign rallies and press conferences. It claims that surely we can get more work done with far fewer people if we just crack the whip and cut the waste. Let Musk/DOGE go in with a chainsaw. 

The news is starting to drift out that mass cuts in federal budgets and personnel mean elimination of programs that people in red districts and states consider essential. Conservative Republicans complain that the Forest Service is not processing timber sales quickly enough -- but DOGE required mass layoffs of the people who do that work. Oops. The IRS is a favorite villain, but cutting IRS employees mean that wealthy tax cheats have an easier time cheating, putting more burden on the easy-to-collect W-2 income from working-class taxpayers. Republican senators from Louisiana and Alabama are complaining that medical research funding at their flagship universities is frozen. 

But the real crunch will come in health care. The policy choices will be clear. Trump and Musk must cut Medicaid spending substantially to retain the tax cuts in Trump's 2017 tax law, the law that reduced marginal rates on the wealthiest taxpayers. Trump-supporting working people in red America will lose their Medicaid or pay more for it so that Trump's billionaire allies and friends keep more of their income. It is a bad look.

Trump is a gifted salesman, but that is going to be a tough sale. 



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Friday, February 14, 2025

Waiting for Godot

"It's the economy, stupid."
 
        Sign on wall at Bill Clinton campaign, 1992.

The sign is wrong. It isn't the economy.

What matters is what people think about the economy. 

The Wall Street Journal editorialized this week about Trump's tariffs and his pressure on the Fed to lower interest rates. The editors think it will cause inflation. The Fed would need to respond by raising interest rates, which will tank the stock market and maybe the economy. They wrote:

“The layers of intellectual confusion here are hard to parse, especially since higher tariffs will mean higher prices on the affected goods. But perhaps the president wants the public to look elsewhere when assigning blame for rising prices.”

Of course Trump will want the public to look elsewhere when assigning blame for rising prices. That is what Trump does. He will blame Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton, the fake media, China, Mexico, Canada, Ukraine, an uncooperative Fed, woke elites in universities, immigrants, drug cartels, environmental regulations, federal bureaucrats, foreign aid, and every potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate.

We have seen how he operates. When an airliner crashes into an out-of-place military helicopter, Trump blamed Obama, Biden, Buttigieg, and DEI hiring at the FAA. 

Democrats need to pull themselves out of their hole. The Democratic brand is a net-negative in enough states that Democrats lost the House, Senate, and White House. It sunk strong candidates like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Jon Tester in Montana. 

Party identification switched in 2024

I see glimmers of optimism in Democratic commentary. It presumes that Trump will damage the economy. And per the formula that it was inflation that sabotaged Biden and Harris -- not Democratic policies on cultural issues or immigration -- then there is nothing to "fix" in the Democratic suite of policies. They can let a bad economy under Trump put Democrats back into offices.

Not necessarily.

Democrats face an energetic master salesperson who feels no need whatever to be factual. Trump will tell the story about the economy that he wants America to believe. Trump will be the hero. Democrats will be the villain. This will happen. The only question is whether Democrats tell their story with the same clarity and energy as does Trump.

Economies are complicated. Nobel-prize-winning economists disagree. Voters will agree with the clearest narrative that best fits their worldview. Nearly half of Americans will agree with Trump because they are Republicans. He will be loud, clear, confident, and omnipresent. If there isn't a clear alternative perspective, then more than half of Americans will believe him.

Foreknowledge is forearmed. An economy doesn't explain itself. Democrats have been in a narrative blackout for four years. College classmate Chuck Schumer is the Democratic Party's senior elected official, but he isn't good at this. Biden wasn't good at it, either.

Democrats have some talent. AOC is good at it. But she represents a bright blue district and chooses to speak for the tip-of-the-spear left, not for the nation's median voter. Gavin Newsom is good at it, but I worry that he is too thoroughly branded by California. Pete Buttigieg is good at it, but I worry that his homosexuality will hurt him. Billionaire NBA team owner Mark Cuban is good at it, but I worry that he prefers to be an outside voice, not a leader of a political party. I worry that current Democratic U.S. senators are too "inside," and too much a part of the status quo to press the "reset" necessary to make the Democratic brand popular again.

Worry and doubts don't discourage me. The widespread discouragement among Democrats means that the next generation of leaders can start with a cleaner slate. They can advocate change. The right Democrat will extinguish doubts and worries by the power of his or her confidence, clarity, and positions. That is how we know we have the right person.



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Thursday, February 13, 2025

Soft-hearted peacenik losers.

Donald Trump is corrupt and self-serving, but he's not stupid and he understands political messaging

He knows how to pick a target.


Republican voters don't like foreign aid. They don't like the U.S. Agency for International Development that distributes it. They think we should direct grants, if any at all, in order to make friends, not to serve the neediest. YouGov

USAID signage removed immediately

Trump has a consistent world-view: It is a dog-eat-dog world. Every person looks out for himself. Every country looks out for itself. Trump added an outlaw quality to this orientation by incorporating that winners make their own rules. Trump tells the story at rallies of the tender-hearted woman who saves a freezing snake by feeding and warming it. When healthy, the snake gives the woman a fatal bite. The woman is surprised at the ingratitude. Trump quotes the snake saying, "But you knew I was a snake when you took me in." The snake coldly looked out for number one. This is the way of the world, Trump says.

When Trump sent in people to do wholesale agency-wide cuts, he started with USAID, the least popular federal program with Republicans. It is unsentimental realpolitik. His MAGA base doesn't like foreign aid. Trump is riding a wave of backlash against the policy and message of Democrats on immigrants, on policing, on accommodating personal choices on gender. Voters overwhelmingly considered Democrats too indulgent and accommodating, at a cost to people like themselves. Trump and DOGE are in charge, so it is okay to be tough-minded and cruel. MAGA-supporting farmers in the wheat belt are unhappy that USAID isn't buying last year's crop. Their voices are heard. The people who might have gotten wheat, but currently are not, have no voice that matters.

Jack Mullen thinned pears alongside me in the summers of the mid-1960s. After college, he entered the Peace Corps. He lives in Washington, D.C.



Guest Post by Jack Mullen
I prefer Presidents Day and Martin Luther King Day, holidays that allow us a chance to read and reflect about ourselves as a nation.

Although a century apart, two books, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Ugly American, provided a moral impetus for two Presidents to challenge our country to be better than we were.

Following only the Bible, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the second largest selling book in 19th century America. Harriet Beecher Stowe brought the abolitionist cause to the forefront of American political discussion. Her writing led to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ultimate destruction of slavery in our country. Lincoln honored Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1862 visit to the White House. He told her she changed the arc of America.

A hundred years later, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer wrote The Ugly American at a time when an American arrogance overshadowed our feel-good World War wins. The book became the genesis for President Kennedy to establish the Peace Corps and its offshoot, the United States Agency for International Development -- USAID.
The Peace Corps resonated in many ways. Americans, mostly young, lived in rural communities, enjoyed the local customs, ate the local food, and spoke the local language. The scope of Peace Corps programs ranged from agriculture and health programs to education and small business development, and many more.

When Kennedy started Peace Corps in 1961, he also started the Agency for International Development. New attention came to AID this month when the current Administration’s DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, claimed on social media that AID is a “criminal organization." Automated responses -- bots -- from Russia, China and Iran agree is the case.
AID is the combination of Herbert Hoover’s post-World War I American Relief Administration, which administered food distribution to a war-battered Europe, our post-World War II Marshall Plan that rebuilt war torn Europe, and all the aspects of the Peace Corps programs.

AID, much like the EPA, is dotted with former Peace Corps volunteers who found cause to continue work they loved while in Peace Corps. That is a problem for those agencies now and it makes them a special target. The wrong sorts of persons are filling those jobs.

Is AID too bureaucratic? Without a doubt.
 
Do those who work for AID become rich doing that work? Hardly. 
Is our aid too generous and foreign policy overkill? No. Our AID workers aren’t even managing to counterbalance Chinese or Russian assistance taking place in those countries. Aid work improves relations with the recipient countries, which is why it has traditionally had bipartisan support in Congress, and why Russian, Chinese, and Iranian bots jumped on the bandwagon of cheering the idea we end our assistance. Workers at AID are mission-driven. They work to provide American foreign aid because it is the right thing for the richest country in the world to do.



 

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Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Constitutional Showdown

Trump is disobeying the law. Openly. Proudly. 

He doesn't think anyone will stop him. Not the Congress. Not the courts.

We are at a moment in history.


Attorney George Conway, a prominent anti-Trump Republican, writes commentary that reflects the worries of readers of the mainstream news. Conway said that the courts will do their duty and issue court orders directing Trump to obey the law, and that Trump will defy them.

Commentary within mainstream media describes a showdown that will alter the current balance of power between the branches of government. If the executive can override Congress' power to create laws and spend public money, then the Congress becomes an advisory body, not a governing one, on anything where the executive has an opinion. If court orders are openly flouted, then we have overturned the 1803 Marbury v. Madison precedent that gave courts power to decide what the law is. Courts, too, become advisory-only. The executive makes the final decision if there is disagreement.

Lower courts have already ruled that some of Trump's actions are illegal. A Reagan-appointed federal judge, John Coughenour, called Trump's executive order redefining birthright citizenship "blatantly unconstitutional." Two other judges in different districts have since issued similar rulings on the birthright citizenship case. 

Other judges, in matters involving the Civil Service, USAID, and spending freezes, have enjoined Trump's executive actions, saying they violate the law. Trump doesn't care. MAGA voters don't care. 

The Supreme Court has a dilemma. Chief Justice John Roberts does not want to go down in history as the Chief Justice who presided over disempowering the courts by reversing Marbury v. Madison. If Trump can defy an adverse court ruling -- and Vice President JD Vance said that is exactly what they are prepared to do -- then the executive department has the final say on what the law is. The spell is broken. The assumption, the agreed-upon norm, that of course respectable, law-abiding people obey the courts, is over. Once obedience becomes optional, then the rule of law is over. Decisions get made, but it is now a matter of cronyism, favoritism, influence and the momentary popularity of the decision. Not law.

The workaround for the Supreme Court is to vote to agree with Trump's position -- any position -- however the case presents itself. That way the Supreme Court would maintain the fiction that they remain the final arbiter of the Constitution, and they just happened to agree with Trump. They are the rider sitting on the elephant's head, pretending that they, not the elephant, decided that it should go to get a drink of water. Trump isn't making it easy for the Court. He is disempowering Congress on spending, and there are statutes and centuries of Supreme Court precedent on that. Trump's executive order on citizenship reverses 125 years of precedent. This could be another Dred Scott decision. Disallowing birthright citizenship to create a new class of stateless people with a ruling that Trump's order is constitutional would leave a dark stain on the reputation of federal courts. 

We are at a "founding document" moment in the U.S., like the summer in Philadelphia when the Constitution was drafted and after the Civil War, when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were written and ratified. Trump believes that governing power in the U.S. should be concentrated in the executive. Trump can prove that this power is already concentrated in the executive by defying the other two branches of government and getting away with it. He is shooting the Constitution on Fifth Avenue. Either the Supreme Court will consent to that by agreeing with Trump's executive orders, or the Court will demonstrate that it has become irrelevant because Trump will defy the Court. Lose-lose.

What will preserve the constitutional order of checks, balances, and divided power? This scenario: A decision by the Supreme Court that blocks Trump; Trump defies it; and then Republicans in Congress stand by the courts, not Trump. It could happen. 

I don't expect it. It is a matter of popularity, and Trump has a cheering section for the actions he is taking, as did Andrew Jackson two centuries ago when he defied the courts. (Breaking treaties with Indians to exile them was popular. Defying Congress on spending and firing federal employees wholesale is likely popular -- at least for a short while.) At this point, Trump is a stronger advocate than either Congress or the Supreme Court. He will steamroll them.



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Tuesday, February 11, 2025

A fable: the Murphys of Pittsburgh

Apollonius of Tyana, speaking of Aesop:
     "He made use of humble incidents to teach great truths. He was more attached to truth than the poets are; for poets do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable. But Aesop, by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events."

 

A specter is haunting American politics. The specter is the narrative of a land that has fallen from a golden age of prosperity, productive work, and self-respect, now replaced by unemployment, poverty, and deaths of despair. 

Closed Bethlehem Steel plant

That narrative leaves a hole. Will a hero emerge to restore past glory and make America great again? Trump offered himself. He seems confident. He takes action. The country starts winning and winning and winning until people are tired of so much winning.

Jerry Murphy's writing gets him in trouble with content moderators on social media. He is a retired high school English teacher and a playwright who has had dozens of short plays produced for school and church groups. But what gets him in trouble are his satirical pieces in social media. Irony confuses people. Readers complain that he writes things that are believable, almost, and it confuses them, and they can't tell if he is cheering something or mocking it.

Jerry Murphy wrote a fable. Everything is going to be all right.

Murphy


A fable by Jerry Murphy: The Murphys from Pittsburgh

I hadn’t heard from my Pennsylvania cousins since the election, but I recently received a missive from Charlie Murphy.

Charlie’s father, Joe Murphy, had moved his family out to the Pittsburgh area after WWII, where he told everyone “I’m gonna get me a job in an Allegheny County steel mill. You watch - pretty soon I’ll be living off the fat of the land like you never seen before.”

And Charlie’s pop was as good as his word. He moved to Pittsburgh, got a good union job at the Homestead Mill and was soon raking in good money, especially since he was hungry for money and would never turn down overtime. He had at least three weeks of vacation every year and he’d take the kids camping in the summer. Also, he and the boys went buck-hunting every fall.

“I feel sorry for you people stuck back in Philly,” he’d write. “Your dad should have figured out how to get a union job where you get some time off instead of being a roofer 52 weeks a year. I tell you, you all ought to move out here where you got a chance for a good job and you can buy yourself a decent home like I got. Also, I get plenty of extra meat from hunting every year.”

We only heard from this family maybe once a year, usually around Christmas. For a long time, he was bragging about how good things were there. Gradually, of course, things began to turn a bit. It was sometime in the 80s that we began to hear about layoffs. Never happened to Uncle Joe, of course, because he had a union job and had years of seniority.

But his boys weren’t so lucky. The Pittsburgh area had about twenty-five mills in the 60s, but they’re down to three now. And around 1973 they had that oil embargo, and the price of gas quadrupled overnight. Things turned to crap fast. When the recession hit, the steel mills closed all over the place. Uncle Joe died, and his boys, including Charlie, lost their union jobs and what little savings they had managed to keep.

Luckily, their dad had a big house. It got crowded with all the wives and kids moving back, but it was better than going out on the streets. When their father died, all the kids got half-decent shares in the old man’s legacy, enough to begin thinking about buying their own places.

Then the oxycodone thing came along.

Two of the brothers died of overdoses.

Most of the grandkids dropped out of school and the whole family was a welfare-dependent mess. Everything around them was going to crap.

And then, out of nowhere, a miracle happened.

A man named Donald Trump ran for president. He promised the Murphy clan, and others like them, a new beginning, a better America. An America where jobs would be plentiful, government waste eliminated, and undesirable immigrants, especially those who would take your job, sent back to where they came from. And most important of all, a family could buy a dozen eggs without mortgaging their future.

So. the Murphy clan changed their voter registration and helped to vote in Donald Trump. The good times came back so fast for the family it was enough to make you dizzy. Donald took all the jobs stolen from us by Mexico, Canada and China and started up a whole bunch of new Pittsburgh steel mills. Abortions ended because women were now proud to have many babies. People started working and drug use stopped. Haitians stopped eating dogs and cats, and they moved back to Haiti. Black people stopped playing professional sports and took up their rightful places as maids and shoe-shine boys. Students began to learn the true history of our country, a proud country with a proud White heritage. And finally, and most importantly, you could once again buy a dozen eggs for less than a dollar.

God bless America!



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