NLT readers should take a little time to look at the county by county reports from the states Kerry won. What you will see--esp. in states like California--is Kerry’s biggest support coming from the coastal cities. I heard someone today (Mark Steyn, I think) suggest that if the Democrat support gets pushed any further toward the East coast, it will be coming from Barbados! Or was it France? Or, one might say, in the case of California, China.
The counties where Bush did well are probably more representative of the state as a whole as there were more of them. Problem is the population numbers in these counties are smaller. So, there is potential for future GOP gains here in California and certainly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc. Let’s get to work on it now! Maybe people from Utah and other safe GOP states should consider moving to states where it is closer?! Or maybe we need an electoral college within the states? O.k., just kidding.
I think that a Republican could even take Pennsylvania in 2008. When one looks at the county by county vote, only about 15 out of 50+ counties went for Kerry. However, they were all in the Philly or Pittsburg area. Those two areas swamp those of us in rural PA. Yet, in this election it was really close. If just the suburbs of Pittsburg could be swayed, then PA could go Republican...
Not that I’m a big CNN fan or anything, but its website does have good county-by-county maps for each state. Go to the website and click your state on the map. Ohio’s map is here.
The same phenomenon--of red vs blue splits within states--was observed in 2000. I don’t know if it intensified this year or not. Maybe Jay Cost will tell us.
In California, large parts of the state such as the Central Valley are red--in some ways the Central Valley is a piece of the Midwest set down on the ocean side of the Sierras (LA itself was long a kind of "daughter city" of the Midwest, settled largely by Midwesterners after the Civil War, but I digress).
In my own home state of MD, the Eastern Shore & Southern MD (really both part of the American South), plus the north-central counties and the mountainous western panhandle (an area culturally much like the famous "Pennsylvania T") are all red or at least reddish. But the densely populated DC to Baltimore corridor usually swamps them when voting time comes. Maybe "exurbanization" will change that--look at MD’s impressive GOP guv and lieut. gov--but who really knows? Delving this trend looks like a job for Barone or Cost.
An opposite trend seems to be the diffusion of blue-state migrants--plus possibly foreign immigrants--into red states. Kerry flipped NH b/c of numerous MA transplants in southern NH. Repubs shd watch this kind of thing carefully, since the small populations of many of the Western states in the "Republican L" mean that it wouldn’t take many "blue" migrants to flip them into the D column.
Simple.
Put ALL states on the Nebraska system
State EV’s = 1 per CD and 2 Senatorial
Apportioned:
2 EV for winning the state total vote
1 EV per CD you win
DO that, and the fraud in Florida 2000 isnt pivoting 27 EV, its pivoting 2 - the two for the state (that CD was already locked up for Gore).
And Bush wins the EV handily with over 290 in 2000.
Plus it brings California, NY, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, and other "bloc" states back into play.
San Antionio Democrats get their voices hear by beign able to give thier EV to directly instaed of being snowed under by heavy Republican turnout.
And Orange Country Republicans are haerd with thier EV instead of being smothered by liberal votes from LA and SF.
Georgia Democrats in Atlanta will be heard, as will all those Republican voters in Pennsylvania who are silenced by Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
It puts the whole nation in play and forces a candidate to do well all over the US instead of in a few big coastal cities and then try to pick off one or two large EV states in the interior.
We need to get this system put in place, especially in the largest states: CA, TX, NY, PA, FL, MI, OH...
I think the Democrats problem, is that have little nobility left to them. They started out back in the thirties, wanting to do good, and make peoples lives better. They ended up, as a party, sanctimonios, smug and hedonistic. Too important to bother with debating in the public aquare for thier ideas. The last forty years they have had the idea that if THEY want something, then it’s too important to let the people vote on it. No. We must , not so gently, move our country cousins to see our vision of utopia. It’s as if Lancelot of King Arthurs Round Table, had gone from saving damsels in distress, slaying dragons, upholding virtues, searching for the Holy Grail, etc, and ultimatly ended up in a cheap rundown tavern somewhere, drinking, whoring, forcing his will on the village, ignoring the villagers pleas, as brigands threaten the village. While telling them HE’S a Knight of the Round Table, and don’t you forget it. Storie’s of your former glories in Camelot, "read sixties" here, are getting rather tiring. The villagers have said "screw it", and have to do it themselves. Camelots gone.