Southeast PA town map

[minionofmidas]

Cool. Welcome!

You got data for the Lehigh Valley as well?

Somebody got an explanation for the swing on Tinicum?

[minionofmidas]

Lower Moreland, the home of Valerie Plame, Nancy Spungen and Terri Schiavio (I kid you not!)

Bryn Athyn, the thing that snakes into it and flipped the other way round, has a very small population and is a settlement of Swedenborgians.

[minionofmidas]

Wow! Great job and welcome to the forum! It's great to see another PA Republican on board (especially someone with such an understanding of the SE). I'm a Philly Republican and if you read my posts, you'll be able to tell that I'm pretty invovled/interested in politics around here. 

Lower Moreland, the home of Valerie Plame, Nancy Spungen and Terri Schiavio (I kid you not!)

I knew about Schiavo but didn't know about Plame. I don't know the other person either.

Sid Vicious' girlfriend (whom he probably murdered).

[minionofmidas]

BY MARGIN (PERCENT)

OBAMA

(...)

Again, mostly places with large or majority black populations. Swarthmore is home to Swarthmore College.

But also this interesting little place.

[minionofmidas]

I'm pretty surprised by Upper Macungie and Lower Macungie, I would have thought those would be strong Republican-territory but they were 49.80%-49.23% and 50.58%-48.45% McCain, respectively. I guess it's the New Yorkers.

I notice the two townships north of that (with the 60ish R shades) are almost as affluent but more thinly populated and lilywhite. (The Macungies seem to be what people usually mean when they use "diverse" as a compliment... quite heavily white but with a few token representatives of every racial minority under the sun).

[minionofmidas]

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.

Yeah, that makes more sense. I just assumed it was in N.J. based on the first map showing only one PA municipality bordering Philly to vote for McCain.

Here is the cause for your confusion:

I also updated the map of just the southeast to include Philadelphia by ward as well as the official results for Delaware County (the only thing that changed is Tinicum which is now for McCain).

Apparently the earlier map had election-night results only for Delaware County.