Southeast PA town map

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You know, these would look awesome if we could combine them with my New Jersey map and Dave's New York map and eventually get the entire Mid-Atlantic by municipality.

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Awesome, guys. I'll see if I can merge that with my New Jersey map tonight/soon. Need standard colorization for ties, though.



Anyone have Delaware data by municipality?

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...and here's the map combined with NE, NY, and NJ.



Link: http://i686.photobucket.com/albums/vv223/nordstrand87/northeast2008.png

Excellent. I was having troubling syncing up Staten Island and the NJ map, but you got it just right.

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Chester, PA still has a Republican mayor and city council, while the city votes 80% Democratic for major races.

So it's either really good governance, or mass bribery. One of the two.

A city with a 27.2% poverty rate can hardly claim good governance. At least, not in the long term.

Helps that they have an institutionalized black Republican organization dating to the pre-Civil Rights era, of course.

[Verily]

Chester, PA still has a Republican mayor and city council, while the city votes 80% Democratic for major races.

So it's either really good governance, or mass bribery. One of the two.

A city with a 27.2% poverty rate can hardly claim good governance. At least, not in the long term.

Helps that they have an institutionalized black Republican organization dating to the pre-Civil Rights era, of course.

Yeah, the latter must be the reason why they have a Republican Mayor and Council though I would have never guessed that they have either. Chester (the city) is a real disaster.

Even with a black GOP organization, I don't see how they have

 Republicans in control locally. The Mayor isn't black (as far as I know).

The mayor is black, actually. Or he does a damned good impression of it in photographs.

http://www.chestercity.com/mayor_butler.cfm

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Great work, Nordstrand. What is the Kerry-McCain township in MontCo that borders Philly?

Living fairly close to there one explanation I have is a fair number of well off white blue collar workers from the city moved there swinging it towards McCain.  It also explains some of the lower Bucks swings.  I'm surprised Lower Moreland even went for Kerry.  It always seemed fairly Catholic and conservative to me whereas Abington/Jenkintown and Upper Moreland/Willow Grove seemed more liberal.  The state Rep in Lower Moreland is a Santorum-esque conservative named Tom Murt who knocked off a socially liberal Republican Sue Cornell in 2006 over the pay raise debacle. 

Interesting...do you know anything about the NJ municipality that borders SW Philly, which appears to be the only other McCain-voting municipality that borders Philly.

That's not in NJ, that's in PA. It's Tinicum, which is where the Philly airport is. The population is under 5,000. Although he has it as Obama-voting on the initial SE PA map, so I don't know whether it actually voted for McCain or not.

At first I thought it was West Deptford, NJ, which is sprawly and far away from any bridges across the river. But West Deptford voted for Obama, and on closer inspection the town you're referring to is Tinicum.

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He has won re-election twice as a Republican.

So basically Chester has something that no other major American city with a majority African-American population has.. a functional Republican organization.

Very odd.

Indeed. Anyone know if any/all of these African-American Republicans publicly and overtly supported McCain over Obama? I would assume they tried to stay very quiet on the subject but.....

Bump.

Anyone know the answer to this? Chester really is quite extraordinary.