Note:

I flaired this 'Graphic' because it was the interactive map at the second link that inspired this post. I don't think I can embed it, so I hope you'll click on that and play around with it a bit. You can hover over or click each county to get more information.

Main post:

A while back someone asked how politics in Chico generally go, and I responded that we are very evenly split. Some evidence for this is that (almost?) every election, the council switches majority from conservative to liberal to back to conservative, and so on. Another piece of evidence is that voters in Butte County are frequently split close to evenly (in the 40-49% range) of which party they vote for in the presidential election (https://datausa.io/profile/geo/chico-ca/#civics).

Here is another example of how evenly split this area is. Despite Newsom winning statewide, Butte County did vote 'yes' on the recall - but by only 3 percentage points. This is the narrowest margin in the state, as far as I can tell from the map available at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/the-nos-have-it-gov-gavin-newsom-survives-in-california-recall-election. The closest is Inyo County where the 'no' vote won by 5 percentage points. Meanwhile, in all of the counties around us, the 'yes' vote won by a greater percentage.

I'm posting this in hopes that people will take a more objective look at our political environment. I frequently see people on 'both sides of the aisle' working themselves up about how conservative or how liberal the area is. The evidence shows that we are actually right in the middle.

Edited: As votes are counted the margins are changing slightly, as of this update the margin in Butte is 4 percentage points. But we are still one of the narrowest margin counties.