In an email from another doper, I see this:
"This is kind of interesting…
Population of counties won by Gore: 127 million
Population of counties won by Bush: 143 million
Square miles of country won by Gore: 580,000
Square miles of country won by Bush: 2,427,000
States won by Gore: 19
States won by Bush: 29
Average Murder per 100,000 residents in counties won by Gore: 13.2
Average Murder per 100,000 residents in counties won by Bush: 2.1"
Um, huh?
I’m sorry, I have nothing constructive to say about this except:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
Well it doesn’t matter now because Gore’s conceited…um, er, conCEded… :d&r:
And if we still required all voters to be landowners, Bush might have had an easier time of it. But, since a large part of that territory is publicly owned…
This is a rather, um, bullshitty collection of irrelevant numbers your pal has collected. Any idea what, if anything, they have to do with anything?
It is not a “bullshitty collection of irrelevant numbers”. It just shows that anyone can find numbers to support their position. You could just as easily show that blacks, or people on welfare support Gore much more than Bush. That’s the idea behind our government, it is supposed to represent the interests of the people.
It is like the “new civil war” thread. Bush won 30 of the 50 states but they were the large area, low population density states. Gore won 20 high population density states and came out ahead in total votes.
So what? Acres, or square miles, do not vote; people vote. Gore’s states are spread out; its not like only a certain part of the country voted for him.
Neither got over 50% of the vote. Most states choose to award electors as winner take all. This let Bush win. If states would have chosen to split the electors by popular vote, Gore might have had a better chance of winning.
No question, you can come up with cotton-candy stats to support just about anything.
If you wanted a stat of this sort for Gore, you might look at, say, the GDPs of the states Gore won v. those Bush won. Or the average education levels. And it would still mean diddly.
Number of people sick of hearing about Gore and Bush - 1,000,000,000
I don’t quite see what “position” these stats are posted to support. What it does show is that the US is a country with vast areas where nobody lives and very crowded areas where most Americans do live. Cities have more crime than farm country. Cities also have more people.
These stats may say more about the way the electoral college works than anything else. North Dakota gets 3 electoral votes. If the electoral college was truly proportionate, they would get 1, but 3 is the minimum that a state can get. Therefore, proportionate to the number of people in their state, North Dakota gets a little extra edge in the electoral college system.
Electoral population
votes
ND: 3 118,405
CA: 54 29,760,021
people/electoral vote.
ND: 39,468
CA: 551,111
Big difference.
Also, there were states like PA, where Gore won big in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but won the entire middle of the state, including my county (Indiana). Does this matter? No. Would it matter without an electoral college? No. If all people in the east of the state voted one way and the rest voted another, it would be the same.
I have to agree with the OP, though. Those numbers are nothing if not interesting.
Bottom line, Gore won the popular vote in the country by 300,000 votes. He won New York by 1.5 million votes. He won California by 1.3 million votes. Gore didn’t win the popular vote, he won the popular vote in California and New York–all the more reason to have an electoral college.
Pun, dear, if you’d pull out a map showing the states won by each candidate, you’d notice that Gore won areas that are mostly URBAN, and the areas Bush won are primarily RURAL. What do urban areas, by definition, have more of? CRIME.
Therefore democrats are criminals:)
…and republicans are podunk hicks 
Hey, not all podunk hicks are Republicans!
This one isn’t, anyway…
turner:
Huh? Why do we get to arbitrarily remove New York and California from Gore’s totals? Can I remove Texas from Bush’s column and give Gore 1.5 million votes back?
Here are some statistics I collected myself:
Bush won 2 of the 5 most populous states
Bush won 4 of the 10 most populous states
Bush won 9 of the 20 most populous states
Gore won 3 of the 8 least populous entities (i.e., those with 3 electoral votes)
I don’t think those stats are going to turn anybody’s hair white, but it does cast the notion that Gore won the populous states and Bush won the low-population states into some doubt. I’ve seen this insinuated tons of times on this site (not usually the way starfish said, which is more accurate) and I thought I should crunch some numbers.
I was very surprised by LateComer’s North Dakota statistics. I didn’t think any state had such a small population. The National Archives and Records Administrationhas rather different figures:
Okay, is this adding up all the states’ areas, or the counties’ areas, or the precincts’ areas, or what? It would be more telling to exclude all the public lands and just add in the amounts of property owned by each candidates’ voters, but I suppose that is impossible with that newfangled “secret ballot” thing.
I’m guessing that this is an unweighted average, which is why it’s even less significant than it appears.
If you separate the states according to whether Gore or Bush won, I think that you get the opposite conclusion: The states won by Bush have an average murder rate higher than the average murder rate of the states won by Gore. For instance, here’s the murder rates of five random states won by Bush:
Alabama: 8.1 per 100,000
Colorado: 4.6 per 100,000
Louisiana: 12.8 per 100,000
Texas: 6.8 per 100,000
Virginia: 6.2 per 100,000
while here’s five random ones won by Gore:
California: 6.6 per 100,000
Hawaii: 2.0 per 100,000
New York: 5.1 per 100,000
Ohio: 4.0 per 100,000
Vermont: 2.2 per 100,000
Would someone with an hour to spare calculate this average for all the states? I think the rule is that rural areas (which Bush won) have a surprisingly high murder rate. Cities (which Gore won) have a somewhat higher muder rate. Suburbs (which they split) have a low murder rate.
That’s a good idea, Wendell. It wouldn’t take me an hour. I have a spreadsheet pretty much ready to go, I just don’t have the raw murder data on hand (now that’s a pretty good name for a band, huh?). Where did you get yours?
As has been mentioned, as counties go, urbans have higher murder rates than rural. But as states go, the South has higher murder rates than the North. So it would be interesting to compare.
“Oh baby baby
I’m twisted and I’m lean
My statistics are raw and my median is mean”
Look at the table given in The New York Times Almanac 2001 or look at the following URL:
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/
Apparently the most recent statistics available are from 1998.
I was hoping the sources would be nice to me and line up all the murder rates by state on the same page, but instead they had each state separately, which meant connecting to 51 web pages.
Here are some data:
6.2 unweighted average murder rate (per 100,000 people in 1998) for Bush states
4.5 unweighted average murder rate (per 100k) for Gore states
6.7 unweighted average murder rate for Gore states and the District of Columbia
I included the second datum because DC kind of throws things off; its murder rate per 100k was 49.7; the national rate was 6.3 (I hesitate to say “national average” because, when dealing with rates, a national rate is the same thing as a national weighted average; someone might think I meant a national unweighted average, which I don’t).
Okay, those data are a little weird. I just took the state “murders per 100k” data and averaged them. I didn’t feel like weighting them properly, because that would mean gathering all the population data and multiplying back. I did do a crude weighted average; since the number of electors for each state was already on my spreadsheet, I just subtracted 2 to get the number of reps, which is roughly proportional to population. The caveat: the data are comparable to one another, but no necessarily externally valid:
6.8 weighted average murder rate for Bush states
5.5 weighted average murder rate (per 100k) for Gore states
5.7 weighted average murder rate (per 100k) for Gore states and the District of Columbia
I don’t expect this is going to turn anybody around on the OP, but these data are very interesting. Southerly states have freakishly high murder rates (and by “southerly” I mean, “states lying to the south”, not “states that were once part of the Confederacy”). The South and most of the Southwest went for Bush, which is why his figures are so high, despite Gore’s victory in some very heavily-weighted states with middling-high murder rates (California, Illinois, Michigan). Anyway, I’m thinking of starting a GD thread on the “why are murder rates so high in the South”. Thanks for the link, Wendell.
Trivia:
The Gore state with the highest murder rate was New Mexico. Picture that on a map.
Montana has almost six times the murder rate of neighboring North Dakota. (Not of electoral interest; they were both Bush states, but I mean … ???)
Most murderous states in the nation, in 1998: Louisiana (12.8 per 100k), followed by Mississippi.