Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
In an earlier post this weekend, The Logo discussed how, on a per capita basis, Ricochet attracts more visitors from blue states than from red. That discovery led us to look at how we ranked among cities -- not major metropolitan areas, but the municipalities themselves.
As with the states, the biggest cities send us the most visitors. New York (defined, curiously, as Manhattan and Brooklyn; Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island are counted separately) is first at about 18,000 unique visitors. Much smaller but politically-driven Washington, D.C. is second. Nothing too surprising.
Cities that Send Ricochet the Most Visitors
- New York
- Washington, DC
- Los Angeles
- Chicago
- Houston
- San Francisco
- Denver
- Minneapolis
- Dallas
- Atlanta
- Seattle
- Austin
- Arlington
- San Diego
- Madison
- London
- Phoenix
- Philadelphia
- Toronto
- Portland, OR
When we change this to a per capita ranking (see notes for additional details), here's what we find:
Places that Send Ricochet the Most Visitors per Capita
- Hopkins, MN
- Clarksburg, WV
- Charlottesville, VA
- State College, PA
- Decatur, GA
- Naples, FL
- Midvale, UT
- Princeton, NJ
- Beverly Hills
- Morgantown, WV
- Winter Park, FL
- West Chester, PA
- Ithaca, NY
- Spring, TX
- DC Metro
- Culver City, CA
- Newport, RI
- Minneapolis
- Madison, WI
- Cambridge, MA
First of all, let's hear it for Hopkins, MN and Clarksburg, WV! We don't really know why they're at the top of our leader boards, but we're interested in finding out. About 15% of the top 100 towns come from places like Hopkins and Clarksburg. Then we notice a few other things:
Urban Areas
The DC metro area and Minneapolis grace our top twenty. Others include Atlanta (#30), Denver (#40), Seattle (#54), San Francisco (#56), St. Louis (#67), and New York City (#76).
Suburbs, Enclaves, or Commuter Towns Attached to Blue Metro Areas
Beverly Hills (#9); Lynnwood, WA (# 22); Smyrna, GA (#23); La Jolla, CA (#25), Redmond, WA (#28), Brentwood, TN (#37), and Germantown, TN (#38) are examples of towns where a lot of conservatives live -- probably quietly -- under the influence of a large, blue metro area. Hopkins, MN (#1) probably fits in this category as well.
And then there's West Hollywood (#27), which... isn't what we expected. But we're happy to have you!
College Towns
About one third of our top 100 consists of what are generally considered to be college towns. State capitals like Madison, Richmond, and Austin may not fit perfectly into this bucket, but they're included here anyway with that caveat. Here's a list of those within our top 100:
| 3 | Charlottesville, VA | Univ. of VA |
| 4 | State College, PA | Penn State |
| 5 | Decatur, GA | Emory U. |
| 8 | Princeton, NJ | Princeton |
| 10 | Morgantown, WV | West Virginia Univ. |
| 13 | Ithaca, NY | Cornell |
| 19 | Madison, WI | Univ. of Wisconsin |
| 20 | Cambridge, MA | Harvard, MIT |
| 21 | Greenville, SC | Bob Jones, Furman |
| 26 | Palo Alto, CA | Stanford |
| 30 | Chapel Hill, NC | Univ. of North Carolina |
| 33 | Newark, DE | Univ. of Delaware |
| 36 | Ann Arbor, MI | Univ. of Michigan |
| 45 | San Luis Obispo | Cal Poly |
| 48 | Annapolis, MD | U.S. Naval Academy, St. John's |
| 51 | West Lafayette | Purdue Univ. |
| 60 | Burlington, VT | Univ. of Vermont |
| 62 | Knoxville, TN | Univ. of Tennessee |
| 65 | Bloomington, IN | Univ. of Indiana |
| 70 | Berkeley, CA | Univ. of California |
| 72 | Tempe, AZ | Arizona State |
| 79 | Austin, TX | Univ. of Texas |
| 80 | Columbia, SC | Univ. of South Carolina |
| 81 | Moscow, ID | Univ. of Idaho |
| 86 | Amherst, MA | Amherst College, UMass |
| 88 | Oxford, MS | Ole Miss Univ. |
| 92 | Evanston, IL | Northwestern |
| 93 | Boulder, CO | Univ. of Colorado |
| 95 | Columbia, MO | Univ. of Missouri |
| 99 | Gainesville, FL | Univ. of Florida |
| 100 | Corvallis, OR | Oregon State Univ. |
Although it's hard to pigeonhole everyone, we're surprised at how much resonance Ricochet seems to have in places with a strong left/progressive influence: college towns and metro areas chief among them. From our personal experience, we've noticed that conservatives feel ideologically isolated when substantially outnumbered by noisy, self-congratulatory leftists. It seems as if we're alone, even though we really aren't, and perhaps that's what leads us to online communities like Ricochet.
So you're more likely to find someone reading Ricochet in Austin (#79) than in Dallas (#125), in Amherst (#86) than in Boston (#145), or in Santa Cruz (#139) than in San Diego (#203).
In other words, red dots in blue blobs.
Notes:
- Only towns of 15,000 or more were included, because there were too many odd categorization artifacts otherwise.
- The only major metropolitan area we included was for DC, and that's because the individual suburbs (Reston, Arlington, Alexandria, etc.), along with DC itself, were so consistently high in our rankings. All other cities were just the municipalities proper.
- Rural areas are reported by county. Unincorporated parts of Jefferson County (TN), Hennepin County (MN), and Shelby County (TN) were the only rural areas to make the top 500, but they didn't crack the top 100.
- The analysis was based on unique visitors over an approximately three-month period starting in January 2011.
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Comments:
May '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Places that Send Ricochet the Most Visitors per Capita
14. Spring, TX
Really? This is unique IPs and not just hits in general?
If so, how many of y'all want to meet at Rudy's sometime?
Jun '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Hopkins MN - Where people with lots of time on their hands read Ricochet.com
http://tcfoodie.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/sign-1.jpg
Aug '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
I avoid criticizing Austin in online forums such as this because, well, I have to live here. I have to get along. But then I think, if anyone in Austin caught me here, he'd have to admit he'd been looking at Ricochet. Well, maybe he'd admit it anyway! I guess I am not safe after all.
May '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Are you sure you aren't counting my multiple refreshes from Decatur, GA? Trust me, I am NOT and never have been an Emory student, although I worked there for a year between graduate schools. The Decatur, GA address and ZIP codes cover most of the county that I live in.
P.S. Decatur = Atlanta, GA in reality
Edited on May 9, 2011 at 12:33amFeb '11
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
I'd like to think that I was a big reason why The People's Republic of Cambridge is at #20
Aug '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
The Logo:
First of all, let's hear it for Hopkins, MN and Clarksburg, WV! We don't really know why they're at the top of our leader boards, but we're interested in finding out.
I can answer that without knowing anything about these towns but knowing a lot about statistics and probability.
It's because they aren't big enough for the law of large numbers to let the random noise asymptotically cancel out to zero. This is also why small cities within a metro (eg Culver, WeHo, Beverly Hills) outrank in per capita terms the main city within a metro (eg LA).
When you have a count scaled by exposure the tails will always consist of places that are small in absolute numbers. This is especially the case when the counts exhibit causal clustering (eg, I tell my neighbor to join Ricochet). You get a similar thing with figures expressed as "percent change" -- places with a low baseline will always dominate the extremes of "percent change." For this reason when people state things as "per capita" they often limit it to "among large cities."
Edited on May 9, 2011 at 12:48amOct '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
I’m surprised Columbus, Ohio didn’t make any of these lists. With a huge university (Ohio State) and the state capitol, the Columbus metro has a large contingent of Democrats. Perhaps the large, conservative suburbs (Dublin, Westerville, and New Albany) are where the Ricochet members are hiding.
Aug '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
I've heard the parallel argument about why MoveOn.org is disproportionately a community of red state liberals. This dynamic certainly describes my own experience, both geographically and professionally.
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Aaron Miller
Really? This is unique IPs and not just hits in general?
These are unique visitors, based on the best, freshest Google algorithms. Not visits.
Aug '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Logo,
If you want to use your admin rights to e-mail me, we can discuss some analyses.For instance, I bet diamonds to donuts that a scatterplot of per/capita to raw pop would be cone-shaped
Feb '11
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
The Logo
Aaron Miller
Really? This is unique IPs and not just hits in general?
These are unique visitors, based on the best, freshest Google algorithms. Not visits. · May 8 at 3:51pm
Well I guess I'm not solely responsible for Cambridge :(
Jan '11
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Tempe has Arizona State U. U of A is in Tucson.
Nov '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Surprised and delighted to read that Naples, FL ranked #6 on the Most Visitors per Capita list. Might I proudly mention we have our very own chapter of the Heritage Foundation as well?
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
anon_academic
When you have a count scaled by exposure the tails will always consist of places that are small in absolute numbers. This is especially the case when the counts exhibit causal clustering (eg, I tell my neighbor to join Ricochet). You get a similar thing with figures expressed as "percent change" -- places with a low baseline will always dominate the extremes of "percent change." For this reason when people state things as "per capita" they often limit it to "among large cities." · May 8 at 3:39pm
Edited on May 08 at 03:48 pm
The granularity trade-off was a tough one. On one hand, we stripped dozens of perfectly good burgs from the leader board by limiting populations to 15,000: Hillsdale, MI and Hanover, NH were high on our original list, with the former representing about 300 unique visitors (UVs). But cutting out the smaller towns seemed to reduce a lot of inexplicable randomness, and the probability of getting improbable results (e.g., "cluster cases") was mitigated by the low consequences of false positives.
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Thank you. Corrected.
Mar '11
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
So how many of Lileks' family live in Hopkins or the greater twin cities?
Sep '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
You can add West Chester, PA, to the list of college towns. It's the home of one of our largest state universities (it's close to Philadelphia, which probably explains the size), and a liberal stronghold in the moderate Philly suburbs.
Fun fact: There are state universities in Indiana, PA, and California, PA, known as the "Indiana University of Pennsylvania" and "California University of Pennsylvania". Sadly, this is far from the least sensible thing our state government has done over the years...
May '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
I've been unable to comment because of a computer issue (now solved) but for the record: mesquito lives in Utopia, Texas, population 300.
Sa-Lute!
Look for Utopia this summer in your local multiplex, because we're set to star, with Robert Duval, in a Major Motion Picture.
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
Columbus, OH: #189
Dublin, OH: #68
Westerville, OH: #79
New Albany, OH: Would have been very high in the rankings, but its population was too low.
May '10
Re: Where You Come From, Part 2: Red Dots in Blue Blobs?
How dare they conflate Brooklyn with Manhattan! Well, at least I'm not attached to Queens and the Bronx or SI
None of these statistics indicate how much traffic consists of lefties spying on The Enemy; For example, maybe Sen. Schumer, up the street from me in Park Slope, is spying?
Edited on May 9, 2011 at 2:21am