McCain won exactly one county in New England (a small Maine county). Obama won at least one county in every state except Alaska, which doesn't divide itself into counties. Just a thought.
Update: Dave notes that all of Oklahoma's counties went for McCain. Almost all of Kansas' counties and almost all of Nebraska's counties went McCain too, so there's a pretty good regional base for McCain too. Just that nowhere near as many people live there as in New England. Dave also points out that blue counties often sit on population centers, which is a good point except that in the South, a lot of rural lowland counties went for Obama (and trend Democrat) because of the high African-American population there.
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3 comments:
Check Oklahoma.
And... int's interesting that in most states, the red/blue counties tell you exactly where the population centers are. I wonder what precisely drives that.
Did they ever render a verdict on Nebraska District 2? Last I had seen it was too close to call. Just curious if at least one of my predictions was correct.
I thought more southern states would tilt Obama purely because of the driving force of lots of black people wanting to vote for Obama. I thought states like Louisiana in particular (with both a metro area like New Orleans - though I'm thinking pre-hurricane - combined with a strong African-American turnout) would tip.
My big question is - what is it about urban life that tends to tilt more voters Democrat? One possible explanation is that living in close proximity to people breeds a sense of communal responsibility. Another is that urban areas have a greater gap between the haves and have-nots, firing class envy. Yet another could be that people who enjoy communal living tend to self-select themselves into high-density areas while those who prefer independent lifestyles tend to self-select into more suburban and rural settings.
My guess is it's the last one, but there's probably a number of interesting factors at play.
The Democrats, though, could have run a dead moose against the Republicans and probably won, in the current economic climate. Taht economic models using only per capita change in income could call the popular vote to within a couple tenths of a percent tells me that this election was not a wholesale shift in thinking but a predictable result of a long-running trend.
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