The Way We Were

Well, it's New Year's Day, and here I sit in my drafty New England garret ready to contemplate the most significant opportunity last year in the intersecting worlds of macro-economics and quants. The winner is obvious: the continuation (from 2010) of the DNC's incompetence. Ah, I bet you were thinking: Obama won? That was no surprise. Given that he won by a larger margin than any one of the pundits predicted, including 538, his coattails were a tad motheaten.

2010 set in motion the eventual hegemony of the radical loony Right. 2012, thanks in no small part to the DNC, leveraged the gains in 2010 (particularly the opportunity to set voting districts and "rules", code for voter suppression) such that more state and local government is now in the hands of the lunatic Right. DNC has much blood on its hands, but they've been quiet. Quaking in their well paid bunkers in Georgetown and Bethesda and McLean.

Here's some reporting on the damage. Countering 2010 and 2012, is the movement (mentioned here before) that urbanization is the great Lefter. Once again The Atlantic lays it out quite nicely (this one is linked). I wonder whether those might be ggplot2 maps?