Politcal Center of Attraction

Map nerds have a love/hate affair going on with today's news. Maps of the political climate are ubiquitous - Pennsylvania is now getting attention with its big primary coming up. Thematic maps are everywhere, which map nerds must love; however, they'd also hate them since they typically feature poor cartography.

Of course, Jon Stewart has the best take on this. He does expand it though to include business intelligence charts - my favorite is the statistical lazy susan.

So let's quickly summarize the Democratic primary maps - Obama does better in urban and uppity suburbs. Hillary does better in the blue collar type neighborhoods. I may not have the generalities entirely accurate, but let's just assume that they are.

Sometimes, these maps look like trade area maps because they tend to have natural groups - spots where the colors tend to group together. This is Obama's section; this is Hillary's. Similar to: this is Store A's trade area; this is Store B's.

Trade areas have a center of attraction - a store. The further you get from the store, the less strong the attraction is. Meaning that customers are more likely to shop at their nearest store. The trade area is broadly defined at the point in which the center of attraction for one store is greater than another.

So what is a political center of attraction? Is it a strong politician like a mayor, Congressman, or state representative? Could it be a super delegate? Do distance decay curves or the gravity model help predict voter behavior or trends in political contributions?

Of course, stores rarely stand by themselves, so you have a mall or a downtown center too. What is the political equivalent of that? It'd have to be some sort of neighborhood arrangement - which hints that the center of attraction would be a good precinct captain. Heck, this'd be easy if it was Chicago in the 1920's - it'd be Al Capone or one of his friendly Alderman!

I'm mostly curious to see how well this applies. If political geography does parallel trade area theory, then you'd have something other than just demographics, prior voting behavior, and contribution data to predict votes. I've never seen the nuts and bolts of how professional political geographers do it, but it'd certainly be interesting to learn more.