Blue dots in a sea of Red

I’ve been saying for some time now that the Red State/Blue State breakdown doesn’t hold water and now, courtesy of USA Today, I’ve got the goods. If you hear a Democratic pol say they’ve got to go back to their base and consolidate their holdings, they’re not talking about states. They’re talking about a handful of very populous counties.

It’s not Red State/Blue State. It’s a handful of blue dots in a sea of red. That’s not a basis for national governance.

Hat tip: Command Post

10 comments… add one
  • Well, it does demonstrate why the Democrats can sometimes win the presidency, but cannot take control of the House or Senate.

  • There are two problems with this analysis. First, it fails to take into account that the cities are population centers — to wit, there are more people in a borough of New York City than in your average South Dakota County. It confuses geographic dominance with population dominance.

    Second, it assumes that all the red counties are monolithically red, a common error given the “winner take all” system of presidential politics.

    If the county-by-county map instead took into account the diversity of opinion that exists solely in one county, I expect we would find a much more blended country.

    –|PW|–

  • pennywit, I’m not making the first assumption at all. I’m merely pointing out that Blue America is very, very compact and, IMO, that’s not a formula for national governance. Geography is important. That’s why we have congressional districts rather than at-large elections of Congress members. And why we have a Senate at all.

    As to your second point, present your evidence for diversity of opinion within counties. Without evidence, it’s just an interesting speculation.

  • I would start with the very USA Today page that you cited. Take a look at the “counties won” figure. According to it, Bush won 162 of his counties by five percent or less. Kerry, in turn, won 131 counties by five percent or less.

    At random, I decided to look at Nevada, available on CNN:

    Most counties Bush won by margins of 60 percent or greater, but several featured lower margins. Washoe County, for example, featured a 51/47 percent Bush/Kerry split.

    North Carolina is also an interesting picture. A couple counties:

    Buncombe County was 50% Bush, 49% Kerry. By contrast, Onslow was 70% Bush, 30% Kerry, and Halifax was 59% Kerry, 41% Bush.

    There is political polarization in this country, but there is still some distribution of Democrats mixed in with Republicans. If you look at some of the tables in CNN’s state-by-state summary, you find that many counties are “weak Kerry” or “weak Bush.”

    –|PW|–

  • Your point is well-taken, pennywit. Did I mention that your blog is a daily read for me? I’m looking forward to the development of your Carnival of the Solutions and hope to contribute to it.

  • Who gets the counties that are gray? The borg?

  • Gray counties do not have 100% of the precincts reporting as of the time of printing.

  • I recall reading many of the American blogs as election day proceeded citing exit polls. It was clear that within states and even communities, people’s votes were splitting down party lines. Even the map above does not do justice to the fact that neighbors disagreed with neighbors.

    The true tragedy of this election is not just the division, but that Americans are not communicating with one another, but stuck in tiny worlds of their own existence, all the way from neighborhoods to Congress. Its bad times, but society is crumbling into a situation where it takes a lawsuit to bring disputants together. Those kids on the West holding signs about secession ar half-right: Americans have already seceded from each other.

  • Chris Link

    pennywti is right. The simple discrete, unscaled map given doesn’t tell the correct story.

    If there was only one person in Alaska, and that person voted for Bush – would you seriously talk about “how overwhelmingly red” Alaska was? Of course not. Thus, population density of geographical areas matters.

    When pop. density is accounted for, and also the “purple” issue, one gets so-called difusion maps, like here:

    http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/101/20/7499.pdf

    Page 4 of the paper (don’t worry about the math behind it) shows several maps that account for both pop. density, and the “purple” issue. They illustrate how close to evenly balanced the country is.

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