akashic / the long memory

A 148-year picture of every American county.

One page per county. Every presidential election from 1876 to 2024. The demographics, religious traditions, and recent political trajectory of the place. A 12-archetype model that classifies how the county votes, and the counties most similar to it across the long history.

Data sources

Presidential election results, 1876–2024: Compiled from the MIT Election Lab county-level series and the ICPSR historical archive, with precinct-level totals from VEST aggregated to the modern county boundaries.
Demographics: US Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024 5-year estimates (2020–2024 reference period). Connecticut data uses the post-2022 Planning Region geography; pre-2022 county-level election totals are apportioned to planning regions by 2020 town-level population.
Religious adherence: 2020 US Religion Census published by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB). Adherent counts are bucketed into seven traditions: Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal & Holiness, Catholic & Orthodox, Mainline Protestant, Other Christian, Non-Christian.
Geographic boundaries: US Census TIGER/Line 2024 county and precinct shapefiles, simplified for web rendering. Precinct maps display the 2024 boundaries.
County hero photography: Curated from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons under public-domain and Creative Commons licenses (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND). Each image links to its source with full attribution.
Editorial copy: County subheads and the lead paragraph of each narrative are editor-curated. Subsequent paragraphs are deterministically generated from the underlying election and demographic data.

The 12 archetypes

Every county is classified by its post-1932 voting trajectory into one of twelve archetypes. The classifier is deterministic — same input, same output.

Democratic loyalist — votes Democratic in nearly every election in living memory.
Republican loyalist — votes Republican in nearly every election in living memory.
Realigner — a deep historical flip; a county that voted one way for generations before swinging hard the other.
Bellwether — tracks the national winner closely with narrow margins.
Populist — large recent margin in a lower-income, working-class profile.
Recent convert — a clear shift in the last sixteen years.
Urban anchor — large urban center with a stable dominant-party identity.
Old Confederacy — former CSA county; long Democratic before 1960, now Republican.
Western maverick — Western state, independent streak, high volatility.
Frontier — sparse pre-1928 data; rural Western pattern.
Sparse — population too low to read political meaning.
Tossup — latest election within two points.

Methodology notes

Pre-1928 data is sparse. About 60% of county-year combinations before 1928 have no recorded result. We render those as gaps in the table rather than interpolating.
Boundary changes. A small number of counties have changed names or boundaries (Miami-Dade renamed from Dade in 1997; Connecticut’s 2022 planning-region switchover). We carry forward the modern FIPS code.
Similar counties are computed by cosine similarity of the last-ten-election margin vector. The result reflects political similarity, not demographic or geographic similarity.
Precinct maps show 2024 boundaries, with vote totals disaggregated to the precinct level. Counties without precinct geometry on file fall back to a hex-grid layout that preserves the aggregate county margin.
What’s not here. Ballot measures, downballot races, primary results, and turnout demographics are not included on these pages. They live in the broader Akashic platform.

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Akashic Intelligence. The Long Memory is the public, editorial surface of a larger platform of political and electoral data tools. Start exploring.