Republicans and maps, not so much

Today we have yet another example why you should not buy snow tires at the drugstore, or DVD players at 7-11, or depend on Liberal Art majors to interpret maps.

Mr. Lileks today coughs up this . supposedly an authoritative map of small "JESUSLAND", his term, has shrunken. The gist is something along the lines of "ha ha, the supposed loud liberal bemoaning about the religious right is all poppycock, see this map."

As a cynic might suspect, not only is the premise unsupportable, the map shows the exact opposite trend of what JL says.

If you go back to the original NYT source, it mentions that this map depicts the relative changes in voting, not any absolute numbers.

So JL's conclusion that the jesus-belt is small is completely unsupported by this map. Quite the contrary, the reddish areas are places where the Republican voting increased. It says nothing about the absolute value of republican voting. Places in the map that are colorless are areas where there was no net change-- they still might be 90% republican or 90% democratic, the map does not say.

The only conclusion you can draw from the map is that even with a decrepit candidate of no particular religion and a clueless vp, a certain streak of the country went MORE for them than ever before. Not a healthy sign. These were the weakest candidates in human memory, and some places went even more for them than ever before. Not an encouraging sigh, IOHO.

To recap, JL set up a strawman, then tried to smack it down with "facts". Only problem, I don't recall that strawman making any showing in the media, and the facts were, let's say to be generous, erroneously absorbed and regurgitated as their exact opposite.

Now we can't say whether this was accidental or intentional. Maybe the only thing we can learn here is to not believe everything we see, especially if the captions have been trimmed off.