The place I saw this map, was on Twitter — the site its vile owner wants to call X — from this recent tweet by @CharltonCussans, a history lecturer at a Scottish university:
The US in 1940 was a relatively normal liberal democratic state (with all the caveats that apply) attached to an insane backwards oligarchic racist nightmare pit.
Of course that isn't to imply the rest of the US wasn't racist — it was — but the south was built on active, continual, and all-encompassing racism to a much greater extent.
The map was made by @Mill226, a mapmaker, with 1940 election turnout data. He originally posted it in July 2021 with these comments:
Map of estimated turnout of the adult population in the 1940 US Presidential Election. The strong effects of Jim Crow voting restrictions and poll taxes are visible (see the WV/VA border!), with less than 10% of the adult population voting in some Southern counties (dark orange).
One of his additional tweets added more data analysis:
Running a regression, we can see that the estimated effect of every 1% increase in the African-American population share is a 1.08% drop in the total turnout rate. Suggests that Jim Crow voter restrictions also led to lower White turnout and/or disenfranchisement of poor Whites.
Beyond the mapmaker's purpose for showing the map, it's fascinating to see the difference in voter turnout that has occurred in some states. Minnesota and Wisconsin tend to lead, generally, but were kind of middling in 1940; Washington and Oregon, now with mail-in voting, have very high turnout, but back in 1940 were quite low for states outside the South. Maine and Pennsylvania look like Southern border states. And Californians… they vote more than that now, don't they?
No comments:
Post a Comment