2012 Presidential Vote in DeKalb County
The attached map is a graphic representation of the 2012 Presidential Vote, Barack Obama (D) vs. Mitt Romney (R), in DeKalb County.
Each county precinct is color coded to represent the percentage of the vote each candidate received. The number within each precinct indicates the percent vote received by Obama.
This is a quick and simple illustration of the political spectrum across the county. The data was taken from a report titled Statement of Votes Cast, DeKalb County, State of Georgia, General Election, November 6, 2012 taken from the Georgia Secretary of State website, which can be found here.
The map can be found after the break.
DeKalb County, 2012 Vote for President, by Precinct
(a pdf version of the map can be found here.)
The map is incredibly telling. I think the utter lack of diversity of political opinion and thought in the lower two-thirds of DeKalb County is astounding. I guess I should not be surprised by those numbers, but they are staggering. Looking at the individual figures in the bright blue part of the map (roughly the lower two-thirds of the county), I’m amazed by the fact that in most of those precincts Obama garnered more than 90% and in many precincts more than 95% of the vote. Even in the reddest portions of that same map, i.e., Dunwoody, Obama still received a minimum of 25% of the vote. Heck, even Dunwoody has a few blue precincts.
ReplyDeleteI think this is illustrative of the huge ideological divide in our county and the fact that 90% to almost 100% of the voters in much of the lower two-thirds of our county are political sheep. Republican or not, when viewing that map it’s easy to see that there is a fundamental disconnect between the much more politically diverse constituency in the northern third of the county and the uniformly single-minded folks to the south. For all intents and purposes, it’s as if you dropped much of the city of Philadelphia into our county.
At the end of the day, divorce through cityhood is really the only way to reconcile such stark differences. Trying to bridge that ideological gap has simply proven over time to be a futile effort, and the numbers in that map show why the creation of new cities is really the only way to go. You can talk and try to reconcile conflicting priorities for years — as we have — but when one side of that discussion is so devoid of diversity of thought, talking can only get you so far…particularly when the controlling majority is so demonstrably monolithic. And while race is no doubt a factor here, I would argue that it’s much more of controlling factor with respect to the votes of those in the lower two-thirds of our county than it is in the north. And based on the numbers in that map, it’s not even close.