I’ve had trouble finding any online precinct data for past elections. They certainly don’t have a high-tech database easily accessable, like in some states.
But that is where you want to start. Check the precincts over the past decade, to see patterns.
I did that for Ohio, and found most of the “outrageous” results there matched patterns from previous elections.
It is particularly funny seeing so many people here, a place where by and large the flaws of the republican candidate were well-discussed, suddenly treating him like an excellent campaigner who couldn’t possibly have managed to turn off an entire precinct of voters.
But it’s easy enough to imagine. In addition to the normal “democrat/republican” thing, and the special Obama “black/white” thing, Romney was also really RICH, which brought the “poor/rich” thing into play, and also was a mormon, which could be exploited by the black churches to further supress a random Romney vote.
John McCain was a war hero. There was going to be the random black moderate who, even though they were pressured to vote for a black man for President, might be a veteran and decide to vote McCain. Such a voter would have NO REASON to vote for Romney. Romney was a polarizing candidate for purposes of analysing urban votes, and Obama exploited that with the “47%” meme, and the attacks on Romney as “rich old white guy”.
Add in that the random McCain voter in 2008 could have been hispanic, and hispanics were even more turned off by Romney, and it’s easy to see how Romney could have lost the random single vote that might have shown up in these precincts. His economic message would never reach ghetto voters who were dependent on tax money for their livelyhood.
It is btw pretty much true that, in these states, you won’t find 100% republican votes. That’s because any really good republican area will be a NICE PLACE TO LIVE, so you’ll get some democrats who move in because they like living in nice places.
What republican is going to want to move into a tenement house in a dead part of a liberal-run city?