Here’s a bit of Friday fluff. Tweets of the day:
Larry Sabato @LarrySabato
When I grew up, VA was the Bulgaria of U.S. politics. Now it’s our Paris. All the cool people come.
1:02 PM – 21 Sep 12
Larry Sabato @LarrySabato
If I were running 4 POTUS, my earlier slur of Bulgaria would already have been turned into an attack TV ad. Bulg-American vote? Gone.
1:27 PM – 21 Sep 12
Hell, when I was growing up in Virginia the state was a political backwater on the presidential level. If you had asked me in 2004 volunteering on my first presidential campaign for John Kerry that Barack Obama, some black Democratic state legislator, would be leading for his re-election as President in Virginia, I’d have laughed at you.
If Republicans in the House of Representatives had their way, the Census Bureau American Community Survey would have been abolished. Luckily, the Senate put a stop to that bill, and I can present to you this table of the Bulgarian-American populations of certain swing states (red and green borrowed from the Bulgarian flag). This table from the 2006-2010 5 year estimates counts American citizens only, since non-citizens can’t vote.
There are few questions in politics that can’t be answered with data, even the flip ones. (And to think that an entire major political party supports ending my ability to create tables like this in less than 20 minutes of research.)