2012 - Electoral Results and Density

From Omniorthogonal. He observes that the handful of low-density counties that went Democratic are almost all minority-dominated; very often those are Native American - those are the blue ones west of the Mississippi in New Mexico, Arizona and South Dakota. You can also see the Black Belt and the lower Mississippi agricultural area pretty clearly too.

Previous analysis by density here, for 2008 - I speculated then that what we're looking at is not density per se but "encounters with minorities", or forced ethnic mixing. Consequently infamously diverse California (using intermarriage and likelihood of whites having non-white neighbors as an index) is a mess on the scatterplot of non-whiteness vs electoral vote at the county level, but in Mississippi, demography does depressingly equal destiny.

That said, in 2008 the combined % Evangelical+Mormon was more predictive at the state level than even density.