Beyond Red and Blue: A Patchwork Nation
The concept of “red” and “blue” states is one of the worst tropes in conventional discourse about American political geography. Fortunately, James Gimpel, in collaboration with the Christian Science Monitor, has produced a much richer geographical portrait, one that captures interesting kinds of variation, such as “monied ‘burbs” (e.g., my hometown of Winston-Salem, NC) and “industrial metropolis” (my current home of Washington, DC), and “campus and careers” (Chapel Hill, NC, home of my alma mater, the top-ranked UNC Tarheels). The CSM will be profiling towns in each of 11 different types of communities during the campaign season.
Check out the website here.
Comments
I haven’t checked in awhile, but when you drove the original ‘red vs. blue’ maps down to county level what was clear was that cities were overwhelmingly blue and rural areas were overwhelmingly red. In California, for instance, the major coastal cities are very blue but the interior is full of, often red, people driving pick up trucks and listening to country music. I think it holds up generally that the more urban a state is, the more ‘blue’ it is, though I haven’t seen anyone dig through the numbers.
Posted by: Robert L. | March 12, 2008 01:01 PM
I’m not sure I see how this exercise pertains to partisanship of geographies. Like Robert L. indicates, if you go down to the county-level, there is a lot of partisan heterogeneity within states, and this has been known for quite a while. What do these various demographic characteristics, which themselves fail to reflect heterogeneity within counties, actually say abou the political system? If this study takes us “beyond red and blue,” where is it supposed to take us, exactly?
Posted by: I Hate Stars | March 13, 2008 03:29 PM