Here’s a sneak preview of next week’s
Journal
, offered by way of contribution to a
discussion over at Eric’s place
. We know that Fortuna apple farmer Clif Clendenen won last month’s runoff election for Second District Supervisor. But where did he win, and how big were his gains (and his competitors’) from the June primary?
Here’s a few visualization tools. First, a results map from the whole Second District and a Fortuna inset. Clendenen is green, Johanna Rodoni is red, Estelle Fennell is blue. (The red actually shows votes for a write-in candidate; Rodoni, the only official write-in candidate, won virtually all of those votes). The shade indicates the winner’s margin of victory over the runner-up.
After the jump, maps of the gains made by each candidate since the June primary.
Below are maps of the increases made by each candidate since June. Every precinct saw an increase in turnout in this general election, and each of the three candidates improved their vote totals in almost every precinct. The shade of the maps below indicate increase in each candidate’s vote between June and November, expressed as a percentage of the total vote increase. Make sense?
For Johanna Rodoni, we are looking at the vote increase over that garnered by her late husband in June.
Clendenen:
Rodoni:
Fennell:
This article appears in Glasnost.
Wow! Great job Hank! Where is that really dark rectangle for Estelle? Salmon Creek?
[…] addendum: Well, check out what Hank did! Very easy on the eyes. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)empty […]
Okay, but wait a minute. All three couldn’t have improved their percentages since June. Are you sure you’re not just indicating increases in raw numbers?
Interesting. 2SH3 is Neely Ranch. And as I’m thinking about it, duh.
Nielson, not Neely.
The other thing that confuses me is that we only have seven precincts in Sohum. I think I’m counting at least 10 in those maps.
Okay, what exactly is the aqua area in the lower left corner?
Alright, the map is starting to make sense to me now. But does light shade indicate a decrease in percentage, or a smaller increase in raw numbers?
Eric: In the June-to-November maps, the shade indicates a candidate’s vote increase in a particular precinct as a percentage of the vote increase for that precinct. (They all went up).
So, let’s say a precinct’s turnout went from 400 to 500 between June and November. And let’s say that in that precinct, Clendenen’s vote went up 30, Fennell’s 20, and Rodoni’s 40. Then Clendenen’s map would be colored 30 percent green, Fennell’s 20 percent blue and Rodoni’s 40 percent red.
If something appears white, then either that candidate’s vote went down, stayed the same, or went up imperceptibly.
Make sense? Seemed like the most reasonable way to do it at 4 p.m. Friday. Three candidates are hard.
The aqua in the lower-left corner is … the ocean! It’s there for reasons that will be more plain once you pick up next week’s Journal.
I think the really dark square is some lightly populated precinct in or around Honeydew. I think it’s Honeydew.
Labels… more labels!! City and/or roads, please.
Do you need a cities layer?
Esprit de l’escalier: It occurs to me that I didn’t take undervotes into account.
The total June vote, here, is the sum of the votes for Rodoni, Clendenen and Fennell. The total November vote, on the other hand, is the actual turnout recorded for the precinct. To be fair, I should subtract out people who didn’t vote for any of the three Supervisorial candidates in November.
Shouldn’t make too dramatic a difference. It probably wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. But I’ll redo things Monday and we’ll see.
Mr. ESRI pops back in! How you like that rendering, beaaaoootch?
There’s a city layer there — you see the incorporated cities outlined in black. But yeah, fair enough. Labels. The true Humboldt wonk will orient herself quickly enough, I figure.
Oh, and the roads are in oh-so-subtle and delicate steel gray, with the highway twice as wide as the other major roads. See ’em?
Estelle obviously took the vast majority in the outlying areas outside of fortuna, but also according to the precinct breakdown, Estelle’s appeal really increased in fortuna in the second round. She received almost 1,300 votes in fortuna. She got over 3,600 votes
beaaootch
Maybe so, but that appeal didn’t translate to votes. As you can see, Fennell didn’t increase her Fortuna vote nearly as much as Rodoni or especially Clendenen did.
Well, I take that back, actually. Maybe she did increase about as much as Rodoni did.
I got it Hank. I’m more interested in whether the relative percentages went up or down. Like this map. But I guess that’d be hard to do with three candidates.
The aqua in the lower-left corner is … the ocean! It’s there for reasons that will be more plain once you pick up next week’s Journal.
Then what’s the white thing next to it? An iceberg?
I see ’em. I just would have emphasized them more. How about x4 width for the freeway instead of x2. And city points. I’m a slacker subgenius sort… work with me SuperSims. And my inner-“true Humboldt wonk” needs a river or three to get my barrings the quickest.
For the record, I commend you for your color coordination abilities.
OK, you got it. I think you’ll get your rivers, too, and least with the close-ups. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to hang fire with the labels. They’d clutter up my clean, Mondrianesque lines. Unacceptable!
C’mon, aren’t you going to guess what renderer drew these? Don’t you want to know what my stack looks like these days? Hint: I haven’t gone over to the Dark Side.
Yeah, that’s what I was originally aiming for, but it’s tough. Maybe one candidate goes up, two go down. Maybe two go up and one goes down. All at different rates.
You could do it like my three maps — one map for each candidate against herself — but you’d have to assign an artificial scale to the shading (I think) and you’d have also to introduce different colors for “negative” growth.
Lemme ponder it. There’s still time for the paper.
Oh, Eric — that Estelle superdistrict you were asking about. I think it’s 2MU. Bob’s joke was that it just so happens to be populated exclusively by firefighters.
Estelle’s dark blue district is Panther Gap atop the ridge dividing the Eel and Mattole valleys. It’s remote. You can bet Estelle was the only non-stranger running up there, where at least radio reception is good. I’d love to know if they have a precinct polling place up there, there isn’t one public building.
Thanks for the cool maps!
Hank, better check your data. Did you include the absentee votes for each precinct?
According to the website Official Canvas, the precinct where Estelle got the highest percentage, 69%, is 2SH-1, Whitethorn. The polling place is the BLM Fire Station.
And she got nearly that, 67.8%, in Redway.
Oops Hank, I just checked and you’re correct. Estelle got 100% of the vote in 2MU, one vote.
Something funny about that. Its a mail-in only precinct and the Canvas shows zero registered voters.
Many people came up to me prior to and after the election and said they would have voted for Estelle, if Johanna had not run. Many of these folks had old family loyalities with the Rodoni family. I have been asked if the outcome would have been different, that is, if Johanna had not run, but I don’t know.
Greg made maps like these to study after the June primary.
That answers that, thanks NAN.
And hats off for your close reading of election results. I remember guessing to you last month that SoHum had provided Clif’s margin of victory. I’m dejected that we didn’t. The most striking implication of these results to me is that Estelle was the spoiler all right–of Johanna more than Clif. But the Rodoni family fortunes were eclipsed with Palco’s, and either Rodoni faced an uphill fight. This was a meaning-fraught election.
Hank, I wonder if we (meaning you) could get countywide maps and presentation-friendly data up for future elections? This is much more informative than anything we read in the press. Thanks much!
There’s going to be a slew of these in next week’s Journal. We’ll put as many of them as we can fit in the paper, and more on the Web site.
We have the infrastructure now, so it’ll be pretty easy to run these for future elections, too. Might have to wait for a year and a half, though, unless you really want them done for school board races and etc.
Eric: I think I figured out how to do your delta maps. I’ll try to get them up on Monday, and into the paper that week.
You rock, Mr Dandy.
Carol, I heard a few comparable feelings in south county around the election. People said they wanted to vote for Clif, but they didn’t want Estelle to look bad so she got their support.
As I think about it, isn’t the Palin phenom all about codependency too? Hmm, how about democracy?
No one can be sure of what would have happened if either Johanna or Estelle hadn’t run. My guess is that in either case Clif would have picked up a majority of the votes.
I just can’t believe that Estelle could get much support in Fortuna, especially when there is a “local” boy to pick. And Clif would have received most of the SoHum vote that would have gone to Estelle, because Johanna’s support there couldn’t be more than Roger’s had been.
It’s difficult to imagine a candidate that could poll majorities both in Fortuna/Carlotta/Scotia/Rio Dell and in SoHum. Maybe Clif will be that person in 2012. Nice thought anyway.
Not a Native sounds a lot like Heraldo.