flickering pictures

Once again, the folks at FlowingData have taken reams and reams of inane-seeming data, compared it to scads and scads of other inane-seeming data, and turned the whole reamy scaddy mess into something fascinating. Check out these maps of cotton-picking intensity in 1860 and presidential voting today in America’s South — see anything interesting?

And here’s a graphic of the two maps superimposed:

Any guesses as to why counties that grew lots of cotton 148 years ago tended so strongly to vote for Obama? It turns out they have disproportionately large African-American populations — 91% of whom voted for Obama. Here’s the analysis from another excellent site, Strange Maps:

The link between these two maps is not causal, but correlational, and the correlation is African-Americans. Once they were the slaves on whom the cotton economy had to rely for harvesting. Despite an outward migration towards the Northern cities, their settlement pattern now still closely corresponds to that of those days.
During the Democratic primary, many African-American voters supported Hillary Clinton, thinking it unlikely Barack Obama would win the nomination, let alone the presidency. When it became apparent that Obama had a good shot at the nomination (and thereafter at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself), their support for Obama became near monolithic. As it turns out, president-elect Obama won with the an overall support of 53%, but that includes over 90% of black voters.

I bet those old southern slave traders would be thrilled to know that their bigotry and brutality would some day help a black man become president.

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