Talk:1884 United States presidential election in Michigan

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Confusion With Map

On this article, it shows all of Keweenaw County, Michigan voting for Republican Party candidate James G. Blaine. However, on the main 1884 United States presidential election article, the map of the counties and what presidential candidate they voted for shows the island portion of the county shows voting for Greenback Party candidate Benjamin Butler while the mainland part of the county appears to be voting for Blaine. Can someone please explain this error to me? --JCC the Alternate Historian (talk) 23:50, 16 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Incomplete vote counts

In investigating the results for Isle Royale County, I found that the ICPSR data for this election differs quite a bit from that sourced from the US Election Atlas. Blaine's vote count is the same in each source, but the counts for the other candidates are not. This could in part be due to electoral fusion between the Greenback/Anti-Monopoly ticket and the Democratic ticket in Michigan, but counts also differ for St. John (Prohibition) and "Others", and the totals for each county are almost all not the same in each source.

In the case of Isle Royale County, Butler still wins 100% of the county in the ICPSR dataset, but with 9 total votes cast for the county rather than 258. Overall ICPSR shows a much stronger third party showing for Michigan, with 10.29% statewide for Butler and 4.56% total for St. John (the latter is very similar to the overall count in the Election Atlas data), and different overall vote count: 403,159 in ICPSR, against 401,186 in the Election Atlas.

I'm also not sure how the margins would be presented, since, as I understand it, votes for Butler and Cleveland are discrete but Blaine's margin would be against the combined votes of both tickets if done accurately. As an example, in the ICPSR dataset, Blaine receives 43.69% of the vote against 18.62% for Cleveland and 31.20% for Butler, giving him what looks like a 12.50% margin of victory in the county; but with Cleveland and Butler's votes combined for 49.82%, he loses the county by 6.13%. (ICPSR shows an additional 6.49% for St. John and a total of 6,177 votes, not 6,037 as in the US Election Atlas.)

Because of the ambiguity of the fusion ticket on the one hand and the ICPSR'S very different and more complete counts on the other, I am not sure how to resolve this.

The ICPSR dataset: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1999-04-26. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR00001.v3. StupidBunny (talk) 13:29, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]