From Abbeville to Ziebach, What are the Most Democratic and Republican Names?
By: The Hot Seat
Tags: Counties And Districts, Names, Maps

States like to recycle county names that have been used elsewhere and it makes for fun headlines, such as when Hillary Clinton in 2016 only won one Clinton county and even then it was close. As I was procrastinating a few actual analyses, this seemed like a fun thing to check out so here is the link to an interactive dashboard where you can look at where the county names appear on the US map and who they voted for.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/noah7751#!/vizhome/CountyNameComparisonMap/InteractiveCountyNameMap

Starting View of the Dashboard

Navigating the County Name Dashboard

Starting under the County Selection tab in the top right, you can type in a county name or scroll through the list and choose as many as you would like. If you choose more than 4 counties, then it usually gets a bit crowded, but you can theoretically have as many as possible. If you would like to remove the county, you can uncheck that box and if you would like to clear the map, check and then uncheck the ‘All’ box at the top of the list. The top view shows the map with every county with that name and the color code is in the bottom left corner. Below that is a box plot for each of the selected counties that plot out the Trump/Biden margin in the 2020 presidential cycle with the right side being more Republican and the left side being more Democrat. An example is the map below that has Washington, Adams, and Jefferson counties mapped to show the first three presidents.

Adams has the least number though almost all of the states with an Adams county are in the North while the other two are in more counties. There are only a few states where there is a Jefferson county that doesn’t also have a Washington county but that is not necessarily true the other way around. In 2020, Adams and Washington counties had a median that were more Republican than Jefferson. The next map pits two of the biggest named generals from the Civil War: Grant and Lee.

Lee counties are predictably found in Southern states (Illinois aside though that is named for a Revolutionary War hero) and Grant counties are scattered around states that were newer during the Civil War on the West Coast and across the plains. This makes sense given which states were expanding under President Grant as well as new states from the split such as West Virginia. Nowadays, Grant counties are on average more Republican while Lee county in South Carolina is an anchor to the left (Biden +28).

You can compare different county names but individual names can also have regional patterns. For instance, British names are usually in the 13th colonies or a name like Sussex county is only in the Mid-Atlantic states. One challenge I’ve played around a bit was county names that are all in a continuous string of connected states. I got up to Monroe with 17 states but then Emil Shabanov thought of Montgomery with 18 states, pictured below. (https://twitter.com/emilshabanovTX/status/1378918600338116608)

I have no clue if there is one that beats this but I haven’t gone through most of the names so if you find any cool patterns or one block of states that beats or ties the record of 18, tag me in it because I’d love to see!

Most Democratic and Republican County Names

Other than the map, the second sheet on the dashboard is named ‘Median Margin in All Counties in 3+ States’ and has a box plot that details the median county win for each name that appears at least three times. There are only 13 of these counties that have a median that leans towards Biden and only 3 of them (Kent, Northampton, and Summit) have no counties that Trump won. The chart below shows the most Democratic names in order starting from the bottom.

The Top 2 are Cook and Fairfield county. Cook is in Illinois (Biden +50), Minnesota (Biden +34) and Georgia (Trump +40). Fairfield is in Connecticut (Biden +27), South Carolina (Biden +23) and Fairfield (Trump +24). Orange county is in 11th place with a median of a 4-point Biden win but this is relatively recent.

The plot below shows that all the currently Democratic leaning Orange counties (in NC, VT, FL, and CA) have moved at least 20 points to the left since the 2000 cycle.

The next chart shows the most Republican counties, and a lot of names have a median of a Trump win of over 50 points.

The highest median is a Trump win by 75% in Beaver counties in Utah, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, followed by Sheridan (Trump +72), Kiowa (Trump +71) and Comanche (Trump +69). A lot of Kansas and Oklahoma counties in this bunch makes Native American tribal names some of the largest Republican wins.

Similarity Index

This next section was done through the hard work and coding of my wife Annie Wyhof, who was also featured previously on the blog for mocking up her own 2020 House model (https://medium.com/@rudnicknoah/ive-spent-the-last-two-and-a-half-years-building-a-house-election-model-18cbf8c50b84). For this section, she used the Stringdist package to run a series of similarity tests. The four tests she chose were:

q-grams: looks at a subsequence of consecutive characters in a string

cosine distance: gains efficiency by using two consecutive windows with a large overlap

Jaccard distance: compares sets of unique q-grams

Jaro distance: measures similarities in number of character matches and transpositions

She then ran every one of these methods and took a subset of all the matrix values to compute to the 0.5 percentile for each county name. Everything at that value or below (meaning it was very similar) went into a larger list that was then R bound to the original names. For each county, the similar name would only make it to the end if it appeared as similar enough in all 4 of these tests.

Armed with this data, you can now see a visual at the very bottom each time you choose a county where it will suggest similar names to take a look at, in no particular order. The presidential map from earlier is now shown in the full view below with this feature at the bottom.

The Adams names are a bit more predictable, but Jefferson has a lot that were described as similar beyond the expected Jeff Davis or Jefferson Davis counties. There were no counties with a similar enough name to Washington though, cementing his unique status. Even though some may not appear to be too similar, this is useful because if you’re just looking up ‘Green’ county, it is helpful to know if there are ‘Greene’ counties to include as well.