Blue Islands, Red Seas by John Gartner [View All]

[madison2000]

We’ve all seen the map of the 2004 presidential election, with the "three coasts" of blue states parted by the red sea of conservatism. That’s fine and good if we simply want to understand electoral politics on a state-by-state basis. Trouble is, that’s not an accurate way to understand what happened on Nov. 2.

The real great American divide is not between the red and blue states, it is between urban and rural America.

Although the popular vote was just a three-point spread, the acreage of the counties that supported Kerry were just a fraction of the landscape. According to USA Today, the counties voting Democratic encompassed 511,700 square miles, a mere 17 percent of the country, while the less densely populated Bush Country dominates from coast to coast. (Alaska was not included in the USA Today data).

Almost every state — red or blue — had urban areas that voted overwhelming for Kerry as well as counties (in which the livestock frequently outnumber the people) that voted for Bush by a 3-1 margin. For example, in John Ashcroft's home state of Missouri, Bush received 54 percent of the vote, making it a red state. But Kerry won the city of St. Louis by an overwhelming 81 percent; he also won the two other most populous counties in the state, St. Louis and Jackson counties, according to data from CNN.com.

http://www.alternet.org/election04/20609/