Red vs Blue Counties

[edschweppe]

The Boston Globe had an interesting graphic in today's edition, showing the counties that went for Bush in red and those that went for Kerry in blue.

Almost the entire map is red. Even most of the map in "blue states" is actually red.

Scary thought, no? (Well, it wouldn't be scary to a Bush supporter - but that ain't me.)

But it does lead one to realize something: the vast majority of the landmass of these vast United States are rural. And the rural voters, in general, tended to break for Bush. I'm not sure whether or not the Democratic Party will figure out a good way to deal with this fact, although I really hope they do.

From a personal standpoint, one bit of good news was that all of the counties in Massachusetts, and almost all of the counties in New England, went for Kerry. In fact, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, staked a good hunk of his political capital on defeating Democratic state reps and state senators - and lost every single race. Odds are he won't run again for governor; the question now is whether he'll stick out the last two years of his current term, or get picked by Bush for a Cabinet job.

The map in question is online at http://www.boston.com/news/special/politics/images/votemap.htm (FYI: contains 187k GIF)

Comments

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Consider these and follow the pointers. It's interesting how black and white things look until you actually show the popular vote.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/claudia_/63097.html

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip!

And I found it rather cool that places like Franklin and Aroostook counties in Maine, and Coos county in New Hampshire, went for Kerry.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

It's important to keep in mind that much of the rural US - especially west of the Mississippi - is very sparsely populated. Those great swaths of red don't have a whole lot of people living in them, and the clusters of blue tend to be on the coasts where the population is more concentrated.

I'm not underestimating the election results, but I don't want to overestimate, either. It's not the End Of Life As We Know It.

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

It's important to keep in mind that much of the rural US - especially west of the Mississippi - is very sparsely populated.

Yep. One of the links on Claudia's post (as referenced by Ornoth) led me to this (http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm) USA Today county map, which also had these interesting tidbits:

Square miles of counties won
Bush 2.51 million
Kerry 511,700

Population (2003) of counties won
Bush 150,9 million
Kerry 103.6 million

Roughly speaking, Bush counties had about sixty people per square mile, while Kerry counties had two hundred people per square mile.

I'm not underestimating the election results, but I don't want to overestimate, either. It's not the End Of Life As We Know It.

:-)

Hey, we've made it through the Cold War (which everybody thought would end with Global Thermonuclear Warfare) and Y2K (which too many techies thought would bring The End Of The World As We Know It, aka TEOTWAWKI). Compared to those, four more years of this will merely suck.