As a New Hampshire Catholic, I’m still upset by the tepid and weak letter by our bishop, distributed to all the parishes on the eve of the election.

Bishop John B. McCormick, obviously a liberal, wrote a lengthy letter that said little, the one paragraph of substance listed life issues first, followed by a long litany of progressive causes.

No moral clarion call was issued.

Manchester, which Buchanan did very well in in 1992, barely went for Bush this time. And the college towns of Durham, Hanover, Keene, and Plymouth went strongly for Kerry.

I think the Catholic Church should have put it on the line in this election. Their not doing so cost Bush my state and Pennsylvania.

Mr. Auster, I’m afraid your friend really nailed it with his maxim.

Remember that the Left was still one big state away from winning the Electoral College. Compare 2004 to 1988. The Left was actually stronger in the Electoral College than in the popular vote which Bush carried by 3 and a half million.

Early this year, there was a cover story in Newsweek (2-23 with their Vietnam histories discussed) with a premise that Kerry represented the Blue states and Bush the Red ones. There is a problem with this theory the rah-rah Bush contingent never grasps. Bush doesn’t really represent the Red states and the people in them. Namely, GWB’s suicidal amnesty proposals and his encouragement and support of the Grutter Court decision, just to name two areas.

I think the upper Midwest states, starting at Pennsylvania, are ripe for moving in the conservative GOP direction, given the right nominee.

I know our country is the United STATES of America, but sometimes it is worth looking another level down. Mr. Auster’s by-state results map actually understates how polarized America has become. Have a look at this by-county results map to see the full lay of the land:

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

Look especially at how divided California is between urban coastal counties (Commie) and Central Valley and northern counties (normal, but for how long given the Mexican invasion of California’s agricultural heart?). The old Northern v. Southern California division has long since been replaced by exurban coastal v. inland rural counties. Look also at the divisions within New York. Rotting New York City and its decaying suburbs went Communist, as did Erie County (Buffalo). The more American parts of the state went Republican for the most part. Look too at Texas, where the Commies carried the Mexican border, while the rest of the state is normal (the blue blob in the middle is Travis County: Austin, home of the state government and the University of Texas, no surprise). The sprinkling of blue counties across the Deep South represents rural Southern blacks who had enough sense not to move to large northern cities, while the blue blobs across the mountain West and the Upper Midwest are Indian reservations for the most part. It also illustrates our rotten borough problem: a lot of those blue counties are full of foreigners who have no right to vote here (not that anyone stops them), yet are over-represented in the House of Representatives (as are their states in the Electoral College) because apportionment is based on the Census, which counts everybody and does not distinguish between citizens and aliens.

The map makes very clear (to me anyway) what the Democratic Party is: the bi-coastal party of big cities and their suburbs (i.e., blacks, other minorities, immigrants, Jews and other white cosmopolitans too stupid not to be liberals) and American Indians. That is a gross generalization, to be sure, but I believe it is pretty accurate. The rest of the country - that might still be at least slightly connected to America’s roots - is pretty much Republican. For me, it also emphasizes that conservative Americans cannot write off any state. I get incensed at such paragons as Pelosi, Boxer, Lantos, Berman and Waxman from California and Shumer and (shudder) Rodham Clinton from New York, but a map like this is a reminder that there are a lot of Americans left in those states whom those placemen do not represent. It is also a reminder that the media - the filter through which most of us receive almost all of our information about what is happening in the world - is largely located in and entirely controlled by people in the bluest of the blue counties.

There is hope there, but a challenge too. I believe many of the people who voted for Bush did so because they believe - in the teeth of the evidence to the contrary - that he is somehow conservative. How to reach them and tell them that he and his are no conservatives and that they should support a true conservative alternative? I wish I knew the answer.

In the meantime, I’m one confused conservative. I live - happily - in one of those blue NYC suburban counties, work in the rotten apple, and my favorite place anywhere is San Francisco and coastal California. I am way out of synch with the locals (I was about to say natives, but damned few of the inhabitants of these places are native to them - that’s a big part of our problem). HRS

The big blue states were mostly red on the county map. The only mostly blue states were tiny ones, where you can’t get too far from the main city. I see the county map less as a political cleavage than as a sanity split. The sane still dominate in five-sixths of the land area.

The Democratic Party has become a coalition of non-whites and nutty whites. Any blue county that’s more than 85% white probably has way too many students for its own good. (Look what Rocky’s expansion of a sleepy teachers’ college did to poor unsuspecting New Paltz!)

I’m with Mr Sutherland on the last part, and as a (procrastinating) applicant to the Sons of the American Revolution I absolutely refuse to cede the territory my ancestors fought for to an enemy much deadlier than the one they faced.

And it isn’t necessary. The serious children of the intellectual class can be peeled away through an appeal to higher standards. “People of color” will never vote Republican, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be driven from the Democratic coalition on moral grounds. The New Class can be isolated and even shattered.

Ironically, just before Mr. Sutherland’s post appeared, I was thinking about the county-by-county map myself. Unlike the state-by-state map, in which the red and blue are clearly contiguous and polarized, the county map shows an overwhelmingly red country with bits of blue more or less evenly distributed through the whole country. In other words, at the county level, blue states don’t look different from red states. Both the blue states and the red states consist of bits of blue in a sea of red.

This leads me to rethink what I said earlier about the electoral college. Suppose Kerry had won Ohio and the election. If there were no electoral college, we would have a situation in which the red states would be dominated by the blue states, with their smaller number and vastly smaller area. This is a strong argument for the Electoral College. But if we thought in terms of counties not states, the unfairness would seem to dissipate, since the blue counties, though they represent a very small minority of all counties in the country, are pretty evenly distributed throughout the whole country. True, high-population metropolises would still dominate low-population rural areas nationally, but that couldn’t be avoided in any case. The main point of the electoral college that I discussed—to prevent a handful of big-population states from dominating and depriving of representation a larger number of small-population states, would have become moot.

This is not an argument for the abolition of the electoral college, just an attempt to think through one aspect of the issue.

New Hampshire went from red to blue for two reasons: We had a very weak Republican Governor who pulled down the ticket. Our Republican Governor Benson was the first Governor of NH in 78 years to lose a second term….BTW, NH is one of two states; the other being Vermont, that has 2 year Governor terms. The other reason is in-immigration….not just from Massachusetts any longer, but now from NY, NJ, Ca, everywhere it seems.

In the past the folks that moved up here, mostly from Massachusetts, understood the value of this low-tax state. The new people coming here don’t share that history. They may move here for quality of life; but they seem to bring their liberal ways with them from the more populated areas of the Country. We are still a very red state…..the new Democratic Governor ran, like the Republican Governor he replaced: on a NO income, No sales tax platform.

Yet; we are in danger here. The more people flood in here from places as far away as California, and the mid-west, the less they understand what has made this State unique, and a safe place to live and raise children.

My younger brother in Arizona has complained about the white liberals who fled California and its crazy leftist regime to come and settle in AZ. Coupled with the flood of Mexicans, the state was even considered a battleground state until relatively late in the campaign.

Perhaps the similar situation Mr. Hagan describes could be called the Californication of New Hampshire. :-)

What has saved New Hampshire more than anything over the years Carl is that every elected position in the state is a 2 year term: governor, state rep, and state senate. By only having 2 short years to cause trouble the politicians can never quite get a solid foot-hold to change the state’s low tax situation. 10 years ago we used to get tax avoiders from California escaping their terrible “source tax” on retirement income. With the source tax resinded now I’m afraid you are right….we are getting a different kind of Californian:(

Steve Sailer’s latest piece at vdare.com shows that Bush basically won by doing 3 points better across the board. He didn’t score much better among nonwhites, nor did Rove expect to. Despite this, Bush is still insisting on a policy which will ruin the GOP. Here is the thread:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/041107_election.htm

I would like to see the map with Republican states colored “Blue-Chip Blue” while the Democratic states are colored “Commie Red.” That’s the way it used to be. I think the media changed it around 2000. John Derbyshire wrote a long column about this very subject a while ago. And I recall some Republican outfits still make their maps this way. Does anyone know where we can find them?

Here’s a series of graphics that breaks down the electoral situation most accurately by taking population in account:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

The long and the short of it: it doesn’t look good for the GOP if demographic trends continue.

More of John Derbyshire’s comments in 2000 on the red/blue states:

Here,

http://olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/FlyoverCountry.htm

or here:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V17A12BB9

Derb sez:

(And I interrupt myself here to ask: What is this with red for Republican, blue for Democrat? The news networks were doing the same thing on Election Night. As a Brit, perhaps I’m missing something here. I had always supposed that red was the color of the Left, blue of the Right. Remember those brilliant blue outfits Margaret Thatcher used to favor? And the anthem of her opposition, still sung at the annual conferences of the British Labour Party?

…Then raise the scarlet banner high!
Beneath its shade we’ll live and die!
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here!

I understand that British and European politics does not map one-one on to the American variety. Still, all the American lefties I know — and I know quite a few — vote Democratic. And “red diaper baby” is, so far as I know, a native American term. What’s going on here?

The red state and blue state appellations came about thoughtlessly, when the newspaper USA Today published a map after the 2000 voting with Bush states colored red and Gore states colored blue. A county-by-county map followed. Or, perhaps it was not thoughtless; perhaps they did not want to label Gore a “red” and did it on purpose. The colors have stuck ever since, but only in the context of these election maps. In other contexts, “Red” still means Commie.

It seems entirely possible that the choice was a deliberate one—a reversing of stereotypes so that people wouldn’t feel that the Democrats were being called commies. That way the colors could remain neutral and descriptive, rather than carrying an implied political meaning. Still, I have found the assignment of colors somewhat disconcerting ever since.

There are multiple confusions in my post of November 7 at 3:48 p.m. I wrote: “Suppose Kerry had won Ohio and the election. If there were no electoral college [i.e., if the election were decided by popular vote], we would have a situation in which the red states would be dominated by the blue states, with their smaller number and vastly smaller area. This is a strong argument for the Electoral College.”

The first problem with this is that if Kerry had won Ohio, then he would have won in the Electoral College as well. The EC can help balance the strength of the rural states against the urban states, but only up to a point.

The second problem is that, if Kerry had had enough to win Ohio, and there were no EC, he still would have lost the election because he would still have had fewer popular votes than Bush. In the case of a Kerry win in Ohio the EC would have made Kerry president despite his loss in the popular vote contest.

There are similar confusions in the original blog entry. My thoughts in this thread were not clearly worked out and I’ve got to go back to the drawing board, er, the map.

The graphics linked by Mr. Copold are fascinating. The by-county map that shows only win-loss information makes it look like absolute Republican dominance across most of the US. The map with the color gradient showing the electoral split in various shades makes things look pretty balanced. But the population-normalized graphics seem to show that, far from indulging in triumphalism, the Republicans need to be pressing every advantage to improve a badly deteriorating demographic picture, just in order to survive. The gist of the final graphic is that there are a number of significant deeply Democratic strongholds; but almost nowhere is Republican strength consistently more than a hairs-breadth majority.

Not sure what to make of it beyond the caution that pride goeth before the fall, but it is interesting. I wonder what the same sort of graphic would look like if it were measuring sentiment about immigration.

I’m less impressed by the maps Matt is speaking of, as visually striking as they are. For one thing, everyone knows that the vast red expanse in the state-by-state map is about area, not population, and that the blue states are more densely populated. So the author is attacking a straw man when he acts as though its the popular assumption that the greater amount of red indicates a proportionally greater number of popular votes. The dramatic impact of that map is that it does in fact show the area of the country of the states which gave their electoral votes to Bush. The author’s comment that territory doesn’t matter at all, only population matters, is simply the democratist assumption that the only proper way to count an election is one-man-one-vote for the entire country, and that all other factors such as regions should be ignored. There is an agenda at work here.

Second, the idea that Kerry won many counties by a large margin, but that Bush won his counties by narrow margins, would seem to be contradicted (or at least counterbalanced) by the fact that at the state level, Bush had many more landslide states than Kerry. In 2000, both Bush and Gore had a huge number of landslide states (defining landslide as at least 55 percent for the winner. That was what was so amazing about the 2000 election. In 2004, by contrast, while Bush had about the same number of such states as he had in 2000, Kerry had far fewer than Gore did. (I counted this up at one point, but don’t have the figures available at the moment.) This is even more the case for the super landslide states in which the winner got 60 percent or over. Kerry had only two of those, while Bush had, as I remember, about seven.

Well, I concede that fascinating doesn’t necessarily mean relevant! I think the concept of “one acre, one vote” is … well, fascinating too. :-)

Someone will probably point out that the Bush landslides in individual states that I mentioned are less significant because those are lower population states. But the whole basis of the exercise is that we are a country differentiated into fifty states. We’re not just one big mass. So the states matter. Our elections have the fascinating structure and drama they have because of the articulation of the country into states. If there were simply a single popular election, rather than 51 separate elections (counting D.C.), it would be like a human body in which there were no distinct arms, legs, head, chest, but just a simple undifferentiated mass. Apart from the fundamental political reasons for maintaining the electoral college, elections sans electoral college wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to discuss.

The principle of the electoral college is not one-acre-one-vote. The electoral votes are roughly proportional to population. A state does not get representation for having low-populated acreage. The significant fact is that each state votes as a distinct entity, and therefore matters as a distinct entity.

You might say that electoral votes are a compromise between rural and urban interests, and thus a compromise between being proportional to the population and being proportional to the number of states. This is because electoral votes are a mixture of number of seats in the House of Representatives (pure population) and the number of seats in the Senate (pure count of states). Thus, the Grand Compromise that led to the Senate not being proportional to population is reflected in the electoral college.

I think it is interesting that our Founding Fathers protected rural interests so explicitly, even though they were framing the Constitution decades prior to the mechanization of agriculture, which caused a tremendous population shift from farms to cities. In rural America, I have spoken to farmers and ranchers who have mentioned the irony that, because a single farmer can grow food for hundreds of his fellow citizens, farmers are outnumbered badly in ballot strength.

The Senate and electoral college are both checks upon the ability of urban interests to virtually enslave farmers and ranchers with whatever tariffs, taxes, etc. would benefit the former and harm the latter. It is only achieved by having not all votes be equal. I guess our Founding Fathers were not the pure egalitarians that modern liberals are.

Mr. Auster wrote:
“The principle of the electoral college is not one-acre-one-vote.”

I understand, but the by-county map gives that sort of view of the data (not precisely, because counties are different geographic sizes, but still a visual approximation of the number of “red acres” versus “blue acres”).

I’m not really making any particular political point here, I just find the different ways of visualizing the data interesting.

To Mr. Coleman,

I would say that the key principle in dividing a society into geographical sub-units which vote as sub-units is not that it makes area important by itself or rural versus urban important by itself, but that it make the distinct economic and other interests associated with different geographical areas important by themselves. An urban area, a rural area, a coastal area, will have distinct interests. Farming communities will have a different set of concerns from city dwellers. Yet these communities will not have the same relative numbers. The regional principle, balanced with the pure population principle, assures that the distinct interests which have smaller numbers will still be represented.

To put it another way, the regional principle recognizes that a society is not an indifferentiated unity, but an organism that consists of parts, and that these parts need to be represented in the government—not in a direct or formal sense (we don’t have representation by guilds for example), but through the regional principle, as mixed with the population principle. It is a profoundly conservative way of articulating a society. Liberalism (and all consistent liberals are in favor of abolishing the electoral college) wants to reduce society to a mass of equal individuals.

On a further point, we could ask, what interests are legitimately represented in this manner? Lannie Guinier wanted to make race such a recognized interest. Even for pro-racial preferences liberal like Clinton, that was going too far.

Mr. Auster asks:
“On a further point, we could ask, what interests are legitimately represented in this manner?”

Well, suffrage used to discriminate on all manner of different things: land ownership, ability to pay a poll tax, literacy. Those are generally good things: as Mr. Auster noted they are things that treat individuals unequally but treat parts of the nation as distinct wholes in themselves. The electoral college is really just the last hold-out from an age when people were viewed more as members of traditional communities and classes than as purely autonomous individuals.

And of course this sort of thing - grouping people in a way that discriminates between one man and another in terms of his power and influence - still takes place under our noses as everyone denies that it is taking place, even since the “one man one vote” court decisions. Gerrymandering is one example. It isn’t the substantive fact of inequality - some group interests being more powerfully represented than others - that has changed. It is just our willingness to acknowledge it publicly and forthrightly that has changed.

In order to function under its illusion of equal freedom, the illusion by which it sustains its own legitimacy on its own terms, liberalism has to hide reality from itself.

Mr Coleman is right about the EC reflecting the Great Compromise, the brainchild of Connecticut’s Roger Sherman. So how appropriate that both of this year’s candidates are Sherman descendants and hence his cousins. (Along with other Ps & VPs, one Canadian PM, one UK PM— Churchill— and Susan B. Anthony. And Norman Rockwell.)

However, the EC hasn’t echoed the Senate’s bias toward small states since the 1830s, when the few states not using the unit rule (aka “winner-take-all”) by custom or law finally adopted it. Once the states vote as units, the bias shifts dramatically to the big states, and especially the electorally competitive states. This is fair, as it balances the opposite biases in the Senate— small population and single-party seniority.

Could Caesar explain further what he means? Why does the winner-take-all rule lessen the power of small states versus large states?

If a candidate has to spend three days in three states, which set of the following would he choose, assuming they’re all equally competitive?

A) Michigan+Ohio+Pennsylvania=58;
B) Wisconsin+Minnesota+Oregon=27;
C) New Hampshire+New Mexico+Delaware=14.

Obviously it pays more to listen to Wolverines, Buckeyes and Quaker Staters than to Badgers, Gophers and Beavers, and that is what the actual candidates did. (However, they did spend more time in Group B states than in the largest, uncontested ones.) Who would pay attention to Pennsylvania if she were to split 11-10? And who went to New Hampshire?

What you’re saying is, a proportional allocation of electoral votes would lessen the importance of Pennsylvania more than it would lessen the importance of Wisconsin. In the case of Pennsylvania, a candidate, instead of winning (or losing) the state by 21 votes to 0 votes, would only win the state by 11 votes to 10 votes. It become in effect a contest over one vote instead of a contest over 21 votes. Meanwhile, Wisconsin is also reduced to a contest over one vote, but the loss of importance is less, since it previously was a contest over 10 votes. So the relative loss of importance of the larger states is much greater.

Still, even a small state has an interest in the winner-take-all system. This argument was used in Colorado to oppose the shift to a proportional system. Colorado has (I think) seven votes. That’s enough to make candidates care about winning Colorado. If it were proportional, the candidate could only win one vote in Colorado, and he loses any incentive to campaign there and appeal to its voters’ concerns.

It’s interesting to think about how presidential campaigns would be conducted if all states adopted a proportional system. It might have pretty much the same effect as junking the electoral college altogether. Candidates would just appeal to the nation as a whole, ignoring all particular constituencies. It would be bad for minorities, since, in the current system, they can sometimes play a decisive role in which way a state goes.

Actually, this is pretty basic stuff to those few of us who bother to study the subject between elections— Electoral College 101, so to speak. I have several books pro (Judith Best [2], Roger McBride) and con (Neil Pierce, James Michener, and another whose author escapes me for the moment). Most of them make the same point, though they disagree strongly whether this feature works to our benefit.

A couple of paleos, Thomas Fleming and Clyde Wilson, have taken shots at the unit rule as corrupt, but I haven’t seen them elaborate why this is so nor suggest with what they would be replace it. These men are as far from goo-goos as you can get, so I want to know why their positions coïncide here! They’re like Robert Bork with his footnote dismissing the Second Amendment.

Besides the mathematical argument, I would add another which these men ought to consider: Perusing the Wednesday morning map with the solid states is as much a cherished autumn tradition as trick-or-treating or Thanksgiving dinner!

The Electoral College, with the tradition of having each state’s electoral votes be winner-take-all, is probably the most important survival of true federalism in the Constitution. The amendments that safeguarded the states (9th and, especially, 10th) have been rendered dead letters by the federal courts. [Anecdote: I remember cramming for the multistate bar exam and being told by the test prep people that in the constitutional law sections one could always discard an answer choice that included the 10th Amendment, as that was always the wrong answer.]

The other was the U.S. Senate, but senators’ functions as representatives of their states - as opposed merely to representing a plurality of the voters in their states - were vitiated by the 17th Amendment. The original Constitution had senators elected by their state legislatures. They represented, in partisan fashion to be sure, their states as states. Now they are basically state-wide Representatives. After that change, it is all the more important in trying to preserve the United States as a federal republic to preserve the Electoral College - and winner-take-all apportionment of each state’s electoral votes.

The founding fathers realized that they were not founding a brand new nation. They were confederating newly independent but previously existing entities, of similar ethnic stock but reflecting their settlers’ roots in different areas of Britain (for the most part). The emphasis on the sovereignty of states within the federal framework reflected the fact that the old colonies were very distinct places. New Hampshire was different from Massachusetts, which was different from New York, which was very different from Maryland, which was different from Virginia… The founders respected this genuine diversity. As new states were admitted, they too were distinct, often on a sectional basis. Maine was very different from Missouri, while Minnesota and Texas are very different places.

Creeping, and more recently galloping, federal consolidation has weakened the position of the states, while mass immigration and intra-American migration have blurred sectional distinctions among the states that were crystal clear to earlier Americans. That is no reason to abandon our federalist structure for the consolidated undifferentiated mass Mr. Auster rightly decries. HRS

Mr. Caesar wrote:
“Perusing the Wednesday morning map with the solid states is as much a cherished autumn tradition as trick-or-treating or Thanksgiving dinner!”

As a former marketing guy, there are two related impressions I get from the winner-takes-all electoral college:

1) It makes it appear as though there is a decisive winner rather than a compromise; and

2) It makes it appear that dramatic differences separate the candidates. That is, it makes it seem as though “the country is divided”, which is another way of saying that the range of choice represented by the two candidates is wide.

So in sum, as a marketing executive I would suggest that the winner-takes-all EC system creates the impression of a wide range of choices where there really isn’t one, and it sets two sides that are nearly identical to warring with each other. This creates the impression that any views outside of that narrow middle range are the purview of the tinfoil hat brigade.

Combined with the Hegelian Mambo it seems to me that this sort of system will move more slowly leftward than a more unconstrained system, but as it moves leftward it will become more deeply entrenched. The winner-takes-all two-party EC system provides a nice governor to keep the engine of liberalism from redlining and self-destructing.

But again maybe I am too cynical.

And of course if the EC serves the function of governor on the Mambo, preventing the engine of liberalism from over-revving itself, that would explain why drive-safely right-liberals like it and pedal-to-the-metal lefties hate it.

If my hypothesis about the functional relationship between the Mambo and the EC is right, it has larger implications. Often traditionalists will argue that liberalism is OK as long as it is kept in context. In our recent discussions on Thomas Jefferson’s liberalism there were really two possible perspectives:

1) Jefferson’s liberalism is a good thing, but only as something integral to a context of Judeo-Christian culture and morality;

2) Jefferson’s liberalism is itself the thing that is destroying Judeo-Christian culture and morality.

If Judeo-Christian morality and culture has been a governor on the engine of liberalism, slowing the Hegelian Mambo and entrenching liberalism, preventing a pedal-to-the-metal radicalism which would result in self-destruction, then we have to consider what our most effective attitude as traditionalists should be.

It seems to me that if #2 above is objectively correct, then rather than “liberating” Jeffersonian liberalism from the tyranny of leftism our goal ought to be to conquer it.

Think of the Republicans and the Democrats as the “Classic Coke” and the “New Coke” of politics. What euphoria, that New Coke has been routed and driven from the grocery shelves.

Yes Matt, but Coke and Pepsi don’t taste all that different.

The defining line between the two parties is begining to blur on many issues. The Republican party is moving more to the left to appeal to a portion of the population that rejects them no matter what they do.

Well, Pepsi now — you might have to go all the way to the U.K. to get something as radically different as that. Or go to France, where you can get your Pepsi in a wine glass. Such a plethora of choices.

I’ll settle for a cold beer and leave politics to the people whose cynicism never ceases to amaze, the politicians.

A female friend likes the map for aesthetic reasons. She says it looks like a red teapot with blue trim.

The reversal of the traditional colors was unsettling to me at first, but it begins to make sense— the red states (or counties or precincts) have real blood flowing in their veins, while the blue ones have only ice water. How perfect a metaphor!

Also, red is the festive color Republican women wore during the Reagan years, and blue is the color of the Blues, of sadness, of the feeling that life is no good.

here’s an interesting analysis of the vote breakdown, using mathematically altered, population-density balanced maps:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

yet another map:

http://littlegeneva.com/images/2004map.jpg

and one more, here:

http://www.enterstageright.com/cgi-bin/gm/archives/00004019.htm

Will’s two maps (‘00 & ‘04) have been condensed into one convenient map over at Salon:
http://blogs.salon.com/0003800/2004/11/04.html#a61

Fewer than 150 of over 3,000 counties filpped this year. In ten states, none flipped at all. Bush won all the counties that changed in about 15 states, including NY, NJ, PA, MI and IL. The Kerry camp’s shock at possibly losing Minnesota for the first time since Nixon caused them to knuckle down there and take every flipping Gopher county. Tennessee shows the effect of no longer having a native son on the ballot. Otherwise, there are few regional trends to be discerned.

“Otherwise, there are few regional trends to be discerned.”

Aren’t there? Just at a glance, of the relatively small number of changed counties, it looks like slightly more of the newly Republican ones are in the “former Confederacy” than in the “Union”, though still many of them are in the Northeast, I realize, but marginally more in the South. Whereas almost all of the newly Democratic counties are in the North and the West, and only a small portion of them are in Dixie… Yet, you pointed out something I hadn’t realized, that Minnesota switched from Democrat to Republican (am I correct? Did Minnesota go Democrat in 2000, and is now Republican in 2004?), despite having more counties switched to Democrat, according to the map… I don’t understand this - of course, not being American (I’m Canadian), I’m not really familiar with the electoral college system, and I certainly don’t understand it. Can somebody explain it to me, and also explain the apparent Minnesota paradox?

(BTW, is Jesse Ventura still governor of MN? Who did he endorse? Just curious…)