Beyond The Red And Blue

Someone (I've forgotten where now, I'm sorry to say.) had only a one-line, knock-off reference to this article from CommonWealth magazine. It would be easy to overlook, which would be your loss.

The author recognised that the famous red and blue map from the 2000 election was simplistic. I still see Republicans who wave that map like a talisman warning Democrats away. But that map papered over a lot of subtleties. Both candidates took varying degrees of the vote in those counties, not 100% or zero.

Robert David Sullivan and the folks at CommonWealth took a slightly different tack, overlaying the votes to a geographical map. They wound up with ten regions, shades of purple as they call it, that tell a more nuanced and predictive story.

Aiming somewhere between the reductionist red-and-blue model and the most accurate (but least useful) subdivision of the United States into infinity, we split the county into 10 regions, each with a distinct political character. Our regions are based on voting returns from both national and state elections, demographic data from the US Census, and certain geographic features such as mountain ranges and coastlines. (See "The 10 Regions of US Politics" for detailed descriptions.) Each region represents about one-tenth of the national electorate, casting between 10.4 million and 10.8 million votes in the 2000 presidential election.

Some states fall entirely within a region, but many are split between two or more. Electoral votes follow state boundaries, but populations don't, and the social characteristics that influence politics spill over jurisdictional lines. Rural sections of adjacent states often have more in common, culturally and politically, with each other than with the urban and suburban population centers of their states. If political campaigns can translate media markets into electoral votes, why not regional identities that cross state lines?

It's not long nor painful to read, and I strongly encourage you to take a look.