Lunar Motion Charts

A busted political myth

A common myth perpetuated by Democrats, the news media, and entertainment is that Republicans are stupid and uneducated. This chart clearly debunks the myth. It also highlights a very important irony. Popular culture universally agrees that everyone in Washington DC are idiots, yet they have the highest number of degrees per capita.

The college degree data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics. The political makeup of state governments comes from Wikipedia’s list of United States state legislatures and list of current United States governors and represents the years 2011-2012.

Nebraska is excluded because its legislature is non-partisan. The District of Columbia calculation for % Democratic leaning uses the city council in place of both the upper and lower houses and the mayor in place of the governor.

Counting the cost of an election

The cost of living data comes from the ACCRA Cost of Living Index for 2011 (the most current data available). The political makeup of state governments comes from Wikipedia’s list of United States state legislatures and list of current United States governors and represents the years 2011-2012.

$1.00 represents the average cost of living in the United States as a whole. Most states are subdivided into multiple areas and the cost of living calculated for each individual area. In this chart, the solid points are the median cost of all areas within a state. The error bars denote the highest and lowest cost areas within the state. The most extreme example of varied costs in a state is New York, where the median is $1.13, but the highest (New York City) is over $2.20.

Taxes are not included in the cost of living index. We can infer from this chart that including them would only make the differentiation larger.

When math becomes convincing

There is some talk from the Santorum campaign about Pennsylvania possibly being Santorum’s last stand. And Gingrich is signaling that he is ready to pack it up. This graphic explains why.
The gap widens.

Iceland is the only outlier

Higher is relative.

I would have liked to use PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) for the military expeditures, but could not find it nor a conversion factor for it. The effect would be that poorer countries would show to spend more on military than is shown in the present graph.

Santorum’s Dream — Santorum’s Bane

On Monday, Rick Santorum’s campaign published its “new delegate math.” Their delegate counts show the gap between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney much smaller than what the Associated Press publishes. An article at ABC News summarizes how the campaign figures its numbers. Their numbers would change my previous chart to something like this:

Recall that candidates above the dashed line are ahead of the delegate count to get the nomination; candidates below the line are behind. Santorum uses his numbers to contend that the GOP is heading for a brokered convention.

The Santorum campaign assumes that the Republican National Committee will force Florida and Arizona to allocate their delegates proportional to the statewide vote. There are two major flaws with this assumption. First, the RNC already penalized Florida and Arizona for their early winner-take-all elections by taking away half of their delegates. If the RNC were to force the states to allocate their delegates proportionally, the RNC would have to give back the penalized portion. Second, most states that allocate their delegates proportionally do it by congressional district, awarding all delegates per district to the winner within the district. It is a winner-take-all by district allocation.

So, let’s assume that the RNC does force Florida and Arizona to allocate their delegates proportionally, and that by doing so they give them back their penalized delegates. Further assume that the states then allocate those delegates proportionally the same way the other states do, giving them out winner-take-all by congressional district. (Two big assumptions, but more reasonable than Santorum’s). How do the results change? Not the way Santorum assumes, and certainly not in a way he would like. Romney would still win all of Arizona’s 58 delegates since he won in every congressional district. Romney would get 84 of Florida’s delegates and Gingrinch would get 16. The net effect is that Romney would increase his lead over Santorum and Gingrinch would close the gap between himself and Santorum. And my chart would look like this:

Santorum’s dream could become his bane.

Delegate Countdown

Candidates above the dashed line are ahead of the delegate count to get the nomination; candidates below the line are behind.

Picking up 69% of the remaining delegates is a tall order, especially when you’ve only gathered 26% of those currently allocated. This explains why Santorum wants to come up with his own recounts, especially his creative option of forcing Florida and Arizona to proportionally allocate their delegates. He claims they need to do it to follow Republican National Committee rules. The fact is that they were already penalized half of their delegates for holding their winner-take-all elections early. If the RNC reallocates them proportionally, then they should give back the half that they took away. They would also have to permit the States to come up with their own proportional allocation, which does not always go directly by statewide voting totals. Many states use county level or congressional district level allocation, which is considered proportional. Many proportional states also do hybrids. Bottom line, Santorum really can’t win this unless he pulls off a backroom deal with the establishment — though clearly a different establishment than the one he claims is throwing this to Romney.

Naomh Pádraig

Naomh Pádraig is Irish for Saint Patrick. Of the three nicknames for St. Patrick’s Day listed in the chart, only one is correct. Can’t guess which one? Look here.

Make a budget

The data sources are a little old, but you get the picture. If you take away the logarithmic scaling then the USA stands out like a sore thumb, but you can’t see the nuances amongst the rest of the pack. The data is not corrected for relative earnings which could bring the USA more in line with the others given higher wages paid to soldiers and other personnel than most other countries.

This provides a slightly different outlook than this previous post on livestock.

But it’s only off by two days (or five)…

Be careful how you quote.

How my Big Dance picks fared

Assuming one knows nothing whatsoever about college basketball and fills out a bracket by picking teams at random, the expected performance follows the guess line on the chart above. Only 10% of such guesses would fall above the 90% confidence line at any stage (represented as a point on the graph). While I did better than guessing going into the Sweet Sixteen, I only matched (at best) guessing expectations for the Elite Eight and beyond. And I know a little bit about college basketball.