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Originally Posted by pulque
I don't want to cherry pick, so I'm looking at the 20 counties you selected based on voting population size. I don't discount the idea that there may be specific reasons for the trend regarding the locality and demographics (eg military votes). But I just don't yet see a statistically significant correlation between percentage of otherpartyvoters and variance.
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That's what you get for cherry picking the data. The drama of this woman's work is the huge variances - Republicans supposedly getting 2-7 times as many votes as they "should" and Democrats getting half as many or less. As I did by reordering the counties by population on an earlier page, showing that the dramatically large variances were clustered in small-population counties, so I do by reordering all counties by the share of Democrats and Republicans of all registered voters. See attachment.
Note that, as I already stated, all significant Republican variances are clustered at the high end, as are all significant Democratic variances. Also note that the e-touch voting counties are heavily clustered at the lower end.
I have no great idea why this is so. At first glance, it seems counterintuitive. One might expect that the greater variances would be in places where there is greater room to vary, i.e., in counties with larger percentages of independent voters. Instead, outwardly at least, the opposite appears to be the case. One explanation lies outside the realm of statistics. The counties which have the highest party ID are not evenly split between the 2 major parties. The top 15 counties by total 2-party ID - Liberty, Lafayette, Taylor, Madison, Calhoun, Gadsden, Holmes, Hamilton, Union, Gulf, Baker, Jackson, Franklin, Jefferson and Dixie - happen to occupy the 48th, 53rd and 55th through 67th places in the rankings of GOP percentages of registered voters. They also rank 1-15 in Democratic Party registration. In other words, these are not just rural counties with small populations, they are also yellow dog Democrat country. But now, they'll vote for the gray elephant, they just don't join his party.
They are also small counties; they occupy 42nd, 43rd, 52nd-55th, 57th-59th, 61st-64th and 66th-67th places in total registered voters.
In other words, given low GOP registration in these counties, the Republicans really had nowhere to go but up. Given these counties' conservatism, the GOP, especially when pitted against the most liberal member of the Senate, had every expectation of going way up, while the Democrats had an equal expectation to go down. And given the overall small population, any big absolute increase or decrease is going to look even bigger when expressed as a percentage.
BTW, of those 15 e-touch voting counties, 11 have more registered Republicans than Democrats. Consider that, corollary to the analysis above, one of the factors keeping the GOP variance lower in these counties was the fact that with stronger GOP ID already, there wasn't as much room to do better.