US Cultural & Political Divide

[Maggie Mae]

50 Maps by the NYT

From the article 

Quote

If you had to guess how strongly a place supported Donald J. Trump in the election, would you rather know how popular 'Duck Dynasty' is there, or how George W. Bush did there in 2000? It turns out the relationship with the TV show is stronger.

That’s how closely connected politics and culture can be.

The cultural divide largely falls along urban/rural lines. We saw a similar divide in November, with Hillary Clinton winning in cities, college towns, Native American reservations and areas with black and Hispanic majorities. Mr. Trump earned more votes in rural areas.

1

The article has 50 different maps of the US, color coded to different TV shows (some I've heard of, some I haven't) I found it interesting. What do you think? Are the linkages between geography, politics, and TV true for you? 

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting article. What made me laugh is how out-of-touch I am. I've not seen a single episode of 39 of the 50 shows listed. And, the only one I watch regularly is The Big Bang Theory. That show did have a dark spot around my area, which is not surprising, because I live just outside of Washington, D.C., which has a large number of technical folks..okay, geeks!

Probably the biggest surprise on the list, in my opinion, was that Family Guy, which was most correlated with support for Hillary, shows as very popular in Alaska.

Thanks for posting the article, it was quite interesting!

[Maggie Mae]

10 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Probably the biggest surprise on the list, in my opinion, was that Family Guy, which was most correlated with support for Hillary, shows as very popular in Alaska.

 

That wasn't as surprising to me as the fact that they included Alaska at all. Usually, we get left out of these types of graphics. According to this link https://www.adn.com/politics/2016/11/19/interactive-map-precinct-by-precinct-presidential-results-show-a-deeply-divided-alaska/, 

those areas were Clinton leaning. (Western Alaska, Native Alaskan Villages, etc). It's skewed though, as TV isn't available throughout the state yet, and some areas only have one or two stations. 

I REALLY like that Prudhoe Bay was measured on its own for these maps and not mixed in with the rest of the North Slope Bureau. Prudhoe has thousands of workers who have nothing better to do in their down time (They work 12-hour shifts for two weeks, are flown back home for two weeks, then come back for two weeks) than watch TV and workout. It's a very skewed population of mostly conservative men with not a lot of formal or higher education. (Lots of Career and Technical Degrees for the better-paid positions, lots of labor, lots of people from Louisiana or Texas) 

 

[Cleopatra7]

The problem with this sort of metric is that it ignores the fact that rural areas are often full of minorities, but because minorities are by definition not the majority, they are overlooked in comparison to more numerous rural whites. Indian reservations, for example, tend to be very rural but the population is concentrated and segregated. Most blacks still live in the South, although not to the same degree as during Jim Crow (I think it's something like 50-60 percent). This is another reason why the electoral college is so problematic, because it makes it impossible for minority votes to have any effect if you live in a state like Mississippi.

[47of74]

I've noticed too how big of a deal the reichies make about huge swaths of the country being red and just certain parts being blue.  What they fail to take in to account is that a lot of times the population size and density of most of the red areas isn't anywhere near what the blue areas are.  Wyoming, for example, when it comes to square miles is almost twice the size of Iowa, but only has about 1/4 of the population.  Of course guys like Bill-O-the-Dumb-Fuck never mention things like that when being reich wing blowholes.