Fun with numbers: Obama wins every single ward in Dane County
February 20, 2008
Barack Obama won Wisconsin 58% to 41%, but it’s more fun to look at the local results. He won Dane County 67% to 31%, and he won the city of Madison 71% to 28%.
There are 188 wards reporting in Dane County (*). Barack Obama won all 188 of them.
My own ward 99 is one of the city’s (relatively) more conservative. Obama defeated Clinton 946 - 377, while McCain received 180 votes, and Huckabee 73. The Democratic candidates combined for 83% of the vote.
In Madison, 89% of the total ballots were cast in the Democratic primary (77932 - 9661). In Dane County, 85% voted Democratic (140754 - 24584).
What I keep coming back to, though, is the fact that Obama won every single ward in the county. Most of them weren’t even close. In only four of 188 wards did Obama win less than 55% of the vote: the town of York (85 - 81), the town of Albion (245 - 205), the village of Marshall (381 - 359) and the village of Mazomanie (220 - 183).
I expected that Obama would do well here, but the magnitude of his victory surprised me. Clinton is a formidable candidate who appeals to a lot of Democrats, and one would imagine that the demographic cohorts which were supposed to work in her favor (lower-income voters, women, the elderly, etc.) were substantial and/or concentrated enough for her to win somewhere.
Judging from the state-wide exit polls, however, Clinton’s attempt to build a majority coalition from those voters simply didn’t work. 58% of the electorate was female, but Obama carried half of them. 29% of the electorate was over age 60, but Clinton won by only 9 points. Obama won voters between the ages of 30 and 60 (56% of the electorate) by 18 points, and he won those under 30 (16% of the electorate) by 44.
Obama won every income cohort, every educational cohort, every racial cohort, and every ideological cohort. He won union voters and non-union voters. He won married voters and unmarried voters. He won in every corner of the state, and he did so convincingly. All in all, I think we chose our nominee last night.
(*) Some smaller wards (e.g. Sun Prairie 14-17) are combined together in the tabulated count. For the purposes of this analysis, I’m counting them as one ward.