2004 Florida Registered Republican Voters vs. votes for Bush

This is a simplified version of a busier chart.

• The Florida counties are listed across the bottom (X axis), ordered left to right, from the most to the least number of registered voters.
• The red area is the percentage of all of the registered voters who were registered Republican, by county.
• The red line with squares is the percentage of the total vote that was cast for Bush.

For example, all the way on the left, Miami-Dade county has the most registered voters. 45.72% of the votes cast for the office of President were cast for Bush, and 34.79% of that county's voters registered Republican.

By contrast, all the way on the right, Liberty county has the least number of registered voters of any county in Florida. 63.79% of the votes were cast for Bush, and 7.85% of that county's voters registered Republican.

Stuff i've noticed

• In this graph, you can clearly see that even assuming that every registered Republican voted for Bush, there are many others who are voting for Bush as well.
• Something remarkable definitely happened in the lower population counties, on the right side of the chart. Unless fraud or errors resulted in incorrect counts, Bush must have gotten large numbers of registered Democrat voters from these counties to vote for him. There's just not enough non-Democrat-registered voters to add up to what Bush received. It's really quite amazing. In many of these counties, Bush was scoring consistently 30 points higher than the voter registration numbers would suggest.
  But before you decide those counties gave Bush the win, take a look at this chart of votes for Bush by county. There's just not that many registered voters in those counties. If you add up all the votes Bush received in those counties, and subtract what Kerry received in the same counties, you're talking about 50,000 votes for Bush, net. If you exclude a few of those counties that are less than 65% white, then the net gain for Bush is about 70,000. A substantial number, but still less than 25% of Bush's overall 370,000+ margin of victory in Florida. Bush won the election in Florida because of the votes he received in Florida's other counties.

A PDF version of this chart

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