Monday, November 08, 2004
What Mandate?
I've spent better than 95% of my life living in "red-states" - Georgia and Texas respectively - drinking beer, pickin' n' grinnin', freestylin', eating BBQ and playing and watching sports, and doing all those things almost exclusively with liberal (even radically so) folks, so this map comparison:
while intriguing, strikes me as simplistic and intellectually lazy when used as a "hey, look, these are the dumb racist motherfuckers who voted for W" argument.
Everybody knows that almost half the people in the country voted Dem, and as this map,
breaking the vote down county-by-county and using shades of purple to indicate margin of Red or Blue victory, shows the Dem half is not confined exclusively to the coasts and the cities. Skewing the map to reflect population
blurs things even further, making the nation's regional "split" appear almost non-existant.
What's it all mean? It means the election wasn't nearly as much of a blowout as that red-state/blue state crap might have you think, and, well, maybe if we scrapped the electoral college and made the candidates actually, you know, campaign, like, in every state, the Dems might have a pretty good shot at winning much of the Bible/Corn/Gun Belt as the heart of our nation is misleadingly known.
(Badass maps courtesy Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman University of Michigan and via SF/J).
while intriguing, strikes me as simplistic and intellectually lazy when used as a "hey, look, these are the dumb racist motherfuckers who voted for W" argument.
Everybody knows that almost half the people in the country voted Dem, and as this map,
breaking the vote down county-by-county and using shades of purple to indicate margin of Red or Blue victory, shows the Dem half is not confined exclusively to the coasts and the cities. Skewing the map to reflect population
blurs things even further, making the nation's regional "split" appear almost non-existant.
What's it all mean? It means the election wasn't nearly as much of a blowout as that red-state/blue state crap might have you think, and, well, maybe if we scrapped the electoral college and made the candidates actually, you know, campaign, like, in every state, the Dems might have a pretty good shot at winning much of the Bible/Corn/Gun Belt as the heart of our nation is misleadingly known.
(Badass maps courtesy Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman University of Michigan and via SF/J).
