100% Romney nope

By Frank Moraes

Philadelphia is an interesting place. It is cut up into 1,687 voting divisions. Of these, 59 voted 100% for President Obama. That's right: in 59 divisions, Mitt Romney did not get a single vote. This is the kind of information that makes even the staunchest Democratic partisan suspicious. Not one vote?

It turns out that this is not all that uncommon. In 2008, there were 57 divisions that cast no votes for McCain. What's more, Stanford University political scientist Jonathan Rodden notes that this is just the way things are, "We have always had these dense urban corridors that are extremely Democratic... It's kind of an urban fact, and you are looking at the extreme end of it in Philadelphia."

Three reporters at The Philadelphia Inquirer decided to head into these divisions in a hunt for urban Republicans. In particular, there were some registered Republicans in some of them. But what they found was that the Republicans either did not live there anymore, or they were Obama supporters who were quite surprised to hear that they were registered as Republicans. One person, a chef named Eric Sapp said, "I got to check on that."

In the end, they didn't find any voting irregularity. And really, why would they? If you were a Democratic operative fixing elections, would you really work it so your opponent received no votes? Even apart from how it would look, allowing not a single vote could so easily be used to demonstrate voter fraud; all you'd have to do is find a single uncounted Republican vote.

The truth is that urban voters of all types are strong Democratic Party supporters. And the poorer they are, the stronger their support. These voting divisions are in poor urban areas. And as I've argued: that is the true Republican demographic challenge.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)