Aleks sends along this graph:
The axis labels are at horrible positions—the y-labels are at 0, 22.5, 45, 67.5, and 90??? instead of the obvious 0, 25, 50, 75, 100, and the x-axis is on some bizarre hybrid of linear and log scales—also it’s not clear what the data are. Counties, I’d guess, but in that case you might as well plot the data along with everything else. Also I’d prefer one line rather than two: no big deal here but if you do want to augment the graph with raw data it would be best to have only one line.
The second line conveys no useful additional information but gives the graph an appealing Rorschach-like pattern that might be just what it takes to go viral. . . .
Anyway, I was reminded of this old graph of Democratic vote share vs. population density from Jonathan Rodden, who wrote, “I would like to see when this relationship developed, in which states, etc. My hunch is that suburbanization, especially after the race riots, significantly reduced the heterogeneity of cities. The era of Democrats winning 80 percent of the presidential vote in big cities seems fairly recent”:
As Jonathan noted, the pattern of high-density areas voting strongly Democratic is relatively new. (But I don’t buy the way his lines curve up on the left; I suspect that’s an unfortunate artifact of using quadratic fits rather than something like lowess or spline.) Also there seems to be some weird discretization going on in the population densities for the early years in his data. But the main trends in the graphs are clear.
Jonathan added the following comment: “The relatively high values on the left side of graphs in early years is due to Southern Democrats and some mining districts. Graphs of the UK, Australia, and Canada look very similar during the same period, with left voting concentrated in urban and mining districts.”
More details (and further graphs) here, also here.