Chrysler Dealers: Urban-Rural Census Data

The Census Bureau helpfully aggregates their data by zip code, so I downloaded their Rural and Urban data sets. In the chart below values close to 1.0 are more urban and values closer to 0.0 are more rural. The cut dealerships tended to be slightly more urban, so there does not appear to be an administration bias against rural dealerships.

	All	Cut	Kept
Median	0.7980	0.8850	0.7734
Average	0.7355	0.7804	0.7208

This analysis and my previous analysis showing no correlation with state-level vote results does not invalidate the work done by Doug Ross, Gateway Pundit, and others on specific abuses. It does tend to support Megan McArdle's view that it's crony capitalism:

I would be less surprised to find out that the administration rescued specific donors from the hit list than to find that they deliberately closed Republican dealerships.

I still think there's a strong argument that the administration (not Chrysler) did close dealerships that donated to Republicans. Doug Ross and Gateway Pundit are pursuing a more fruitful path than mine by focusing on the donor data.

Spreadsheet is too large (1.7M) for Google docs, so email me if you want it.

More later....