Red Shift/Blue Shift--A County-Level View

by: Paul Rosenberg

Thu Nov 06, 2008 at 12:45


The New York Times has a set of maps and charts that add some dramatic detail to the nature of Obama's victory--particularly its set of county-level maps.  First up, a county-level map showing the whopping 22% of counties that became more Republican this election than they were in 2004:

One can't help but notice how intensely concentrated these counties are in the Scotch-Irish Appalachian uplands and the Ozarks, along with the nearby regions of Oklahoma, East Texas and Louisiana.   This is, by McPalin's account, the "real America".  It is also, not coincidentally, the most culturally isolated and technologically backward part of the country.  If any part of America is similar to Afghanistan, in its remoteness from the modern world, and resistance to integration with the dynamic swirl of history around it, it is these counties, which portend the future of the GOP as not just a regional party of the South, but a shrinking one even within that region.
Paul Rosenberg :: Red Shift/Blue Shift--A County-Level View
In contrast, the Democratic county-level shift saturates the map from sea to shinning sea, with a particularly impressive concentation in Indiana marking the beginning of a blue ocean that encompasses most of the Great Plains and the Mountain West--places where the GOP's hold is clearly slipping, and slipping badly:

Focusing only on the states that McCain won, we can see a clear picture of how the GOP's hold on the West is slipping, particularly in Montana, and the Dakotas, all of which should be easily within reach in 2012, if Obama's first term is reasonably successful:

In sharp contrast, Obama's strength is almost ubiquitous across the states he won.  Virtually the only region that did not move in his direction was the Florida panhandle and its environs, the most typically Southern parts of Florida.  Even the Appalachian tip of Western Virginia where a sport of red is visible is too small to be considered a region:

The intensity of the shift towards Obama is particularly noteworthy in Indiana, New Mexico and Nevada:

In summary: Impressive as this election was, this county-level look at the election clearly shows a potential for much more dramatic shifts in our favor yet to come.

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Red Shift/Blue Shift--A County-Level View | 40 comments
Amazing map. Just one troubling oddity.... (0.00 / 0)
What is up with my beloved home state of Mass.? I moved to CT 30 years ago and spend lots of time back around Boston as well as on the Cape so I'm in pretty close touch. Indeed I have sensed an increase in conservatism. Then along comes the ballot initiative for income tax elimination, which failed, but still.

Can someone provide some poli-sci for me on those pink rectangles in the Bay State ??  

I'm Not An Expert On Mass Politics (4.00 / 1)
but it's not surprising that Kerry did better in some counties in his home state than Obama did.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
OK (4.00 / 1)
It's compared to 2004. Kerry probably ran particularly strongly in MA. Same reason why Arizona has some pink this year.  
[ Parent ]
My in-depth political scientifical analysis: (4.00 / 3)
Kerry was from Massachusetts.
[ Parent ]
Bush was from Connecticut (0.00 / 0)
Andover, no less.
[ Parent ]
The comparison to 2004 and 2000 is encouraging, but... (0.00 / 0)
On this page you get to change the year that voting shifts are compared to. 2008 is bluer than 2004 and 2000, but still redder than 1996 or 1992. Seems we've only gotten back to a country as democratic as it was in about 1998....

That's not an entirely fair characterization - the population centers are bluer now than in either 1996 or 1992, it's the big swath of rural counties that are still redder now.

True, But (0.00 / 0)
Bush I in '92 and Dole in '96 were among the weakest GOP candidates in quite some time, while Perot got 19% in '92 and 9% in '96.  If McCain hadn't had the base-boosting effect of Palin, he might have been a comparable candidate, as the GOP base was not enthusiastic for either Bush or Dole either.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
That's one hypothesis (0.00 / 0)
An alternate one that comes to mind is that race still matters in a lot of places that were willing to vote for Clinton on the economy, but not for Obama.
[ Parent ]
Probably Not (0.00 / 0)
Because of Perot, we're talking apples and oranges. If Clinton beat Bush by 4 points, and Obama lost to McCain by 2 in some county, Obama could still have gotten a larger percentage of the overall vote, due to the 19% chunk that Perot took, on average.  Perot got about half that in 1996, but it still made a significant difference.

Look at Coconino County in Northcentral Arizona, for example.  In 1996 Clinton took the county 53-35, for an 18% margin. This year, Obama took it 57-41, for a 16% margin.  So the margin decreased by 2%, making it a light red county.  But Obama actually got 4% more of the vote than Clinton got--in McCain's home state!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
interesting (0.00 / 0)
Clinton did much better in the smaller population centres. It would be nice if it  had '88 on those maps.
[ Parent ]
Thoughts (0.00 / 0)
Looking at the first map showing the counties that became more Republican, two thoughts come to mind.  First, I wonder about the change in Louisiana, and how much of that change can be attributed directly to Katrina and how much can be attributed to Gov. Bobby Jindal.  Second, looking at the large increase in Arkansas, I wonder if this was the last bastion for PUMA.

Obama would have won Arizona (4.00 / 1)
if not for the home-state effect.

Every neighboring state in the southwest - Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and California - improved on 2004 by more than the country as a whole; the range for those 5 states was D+13 (CO) to D+17 (UT). In 2004, Bush won Arizona by 11. It seems very likely, then, that if not for McCain being from Arizona, Obama would have won the state by 2 to 6 points.

Yep (0.00 / 0)
My guess is Arizona would have looked just like the nearby states on this map if it wasn't McCain's home state.  In fact, the polls narrowed greatly just before the election; almost to a dead heat.  In hindsight, it was probably wrong for Obama to run commercials there at the end.  That set up the narrative of embarrassing McCain, and I don't think the people in Arizona wanted to embarrass their Senator, they just liked Obama.
[ Parent ]
Agree completely (0.00 / 0)
I think AZ will be fertile territory for Obama's reelection in 2012 (and it is projected to have 2 more EVs after 2010)
[ Parent ]
Kind of makes me want to register "R" for the 2012 primaries... (0.00 / 0)
So I can vote for Huckabee to be their nominee and help consolidate this shift to regional party status.

"A fantasy is not even a wish, much less an act.  There is no such thing as a culpable or shameful fantasy."  -----Lady Sally McGee
Is it Appalachia, or is it the South? (0.00 / 0)
One thing I've wondered about is whether Obama's underperformance (in both the primaries and the general election) is a phenomenon of Appalachia, or of the white population of the south in general. On the map, of course, it clearly looks like the Upland South is the problem for Obama. But one way to characterize the Upland South is simply as the portion of the South that has very few blacks. So it would be interesting to see a map showing only the change among white voters, to see if Obama also underperformed among those groups in the coastal plain areas of the South, where his margins were presumably much improved by high turnout and percentages among black voters.
It's More Complicated (0.00 / 0)
by the fact that the white population in the lowlands is more diverse.  There's more in-migration, not just in Northern Virginia, but in North Carolina urban centers as well.  So while it would be helpful to have the data you seek, it still wouldn't tell us the whole story.

There's also the growing Latino population to consider as well.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I agree (4.00 / 1)
So here's another way to put it...

Back during the primaries, I kept trying to argue against Sirota's race chasm theory. (Unfortunately, I could never get him to respond to my criticism.) The upshot is that the correlation I found was not between Hillary's support in the primaries and a given state's black population being between 6-17% or whatever; the stronger correlation seemed to be between the Obama share of the white vote in a given southern state and the degree to which that state had a low percentage of residents who came from out of state. (I'm no statistician, so this theory was based on my simply eyeballing the numbers. But the analysis is here.)

If this trend held in the general election, too, then you'd probably see Obama doing as well or slightly better than Kerry among whites in, e.g., the suburbs of Atlanta and Raleigh, but probably worse in the lowland counties of southern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

So in short, rather than fixating on an "Appalachia Theory" of Obama's underperformance, maybe one could just say that Obama did worse than Kerry among whites in insular areas of the Greater South. It has the ring of plausibilty, no?

[ Parent ]
I Don't Think These Are Mutually Exclusive Arguments (0.00 / 0)
First off, there's other data prior to this election that's supportive of David's thesis.  But there's also good reason to think that in-migration reinforces the effect.  All other things being equal, places with sharper racial conflict will be less attractive to outsiders, and thus have lower rates of in-migration.

It would be good to see some really thorough investigation of this.  Obviously a state-level data set alone is not terribly big.  You need to look at SMSA and county-level data as well.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
It's actually ignorance (4.00 / 1)
no matter where the region.

The Red Shift just happens to lose all its Progressives to out-migration.

[ Parent ]
Not all. (0.00 / 0)


Montani semper liberi
[ Parent ]
Blue dogs: Cause or Effect (0.00 / 0)
One striking thing is that areas that became more Republican have a lot of Blue Dog representation in the House.  Arkansas (2 of 3 Dems are Blue Dogs), Tennessee (4 of 5), OK (1 of 1), GA (4 of 6), AL (1 of 2) and KY (1 of 2) all have Democratic delgations where at least half of the Dems are Blue Dogs.

Are they conservatives because they have to be or are they destroying the Democratic brand in those states?

the reverse i think (0.00 / 0)
those areas have blue dogs because they have democrats at all. They are areas where demcrats still get elected, where as other parts of the south the only Ds are in minority-majority districts.
[ Parent ]
Blue Dogs Are Corporate Friendly (4.00 / 1)
There's no good reason on God's green earth for working class Southern whites to favor them over progressive populists.  It has everything to do with the power structures, rather than the voting populace.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Appalachia Trends Don't Hold in NC (0.00 / 0)
I must note that the mountain regions of NC came in pretty good for Obama.  He even won 3 mountain counties, including a substantial win in Buncombe County (Asheville), which put Obama over the top for good.

North Carolina has a long, proud tradition of strong support for higher education, with an excellent public university system that stretches across the state.  This is no coincidence!

Right (0.00 / 0)
At least as far back as VO Key's 1950 classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation this difference has been widely recognized.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Texas (0.00 / 0)
I live in Austin, and grew up in East Texas, in the 1970's.  One thing I note about this map is that the parts of Texas that got redder are losing population.  Dallas, which in 1974 was the first Southern city to elect Republicans, is now reliably blue.  Houston, and even its western suburbs, is mostly Democratic.  The reason Texas remains Red is that it's such a bloody huge place, and there is still a lot of people scattered in the hinterland.  We have 254 counties, and while most of the population lives in Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Tarrant, and Travis, that still leaves 249 counties.  These counties have Wyoming levels of population density, which makes campaigning there astronomically expensive.  Still, those remote places have half the population, so we need to do something.  Is it possible have the New Mexico Dems work in West Texas, while the rest of us work in suburban Dallas and Houston?  I have no idea what to do about the Big Thicket.  
I disagree (0.00 / 0)
McCain's biggest numerical margins in Texas were in the suburbs of DFW and Houston - Collin, Denton, Montgomery, etc. These are the source of strength for Republicans in Texas, and their populations are booming. As you say, there just aren't many people in the spaces in between, so they don't count for much (even if they cause the map to be colored a ghastly shade of red).

That said, Harris County (Houston + many of it's suburbs) went blue for the first time since 1964. Dallas County is now very solidly blue (Obama won it 57-42). Bexar County (San Antonio) went blue. And Obama had huge margins in El Paso and Travis (Austin). In short, all the big cities in Texas, except for Ft. Worth, are now blue and getting bluer. The key for the future will be to expand these islands of blue - not so much into the remote countryside (that ain't happening anytime soon), but into the suburbs around Dallas and Houston, and in the I-35 corridor. One good sign that this may be starting to happen: McCain barely won Fort Bend County - the home of Sugarland, and Tom Delay's old stomping grounds - by 51-49.

[ Parent ]
Indiana As A Model For The Suburbs (0.00 / 0)
I've taken a peak at Indiana, and Obama made his biggest gains in terms of percent increase in the counties surrounding Indianapolis.  So the question is, "what did they do there, and can it be replicated?"

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Texas 'burbs (0.00 / 0)
Good point about the huge margins in places like Plano and Montgomery County.  From this map it looks like at least some of the Dallas suburban counties are bluer than they were four years ago, though.  It seems like we should be able to make inroads there, at least in some of the inner-ring 'burbs.  Richardson, in northern Dallas County mostly, was a white-flight haven when I was growing up and is now one of the more diverse places in that area.  There's lots of high-tech growth in those places too.  

In Houston, if the Obama administration puts a little money toward NASA, that might help.  We're all terribly proud that the astronauts on the International Space Station voted in Texas.  Is there an ex-astronaut who could be recruited to run as a Democrat?

[ Parent ]
Texas is critical to long term electoral success (0.00 / 0)
Considering that it already has 34 EVs and is projected to grow to 38 in 2010, Dems need to make Texas competitive over the next several cycles.
[ Parent ]
Why? (0.00 / 0)
When other states will flip long before Texas?

Texas flipping presumes a 400 EV scenario, thus it isn't necessary.

BTW Ron Paul is considered a leftist in Texas. (Perhaps even a radical).

[ Parent ]
Oklahoma (0.00 / 0)
It was truly frustrating to see the election results from my state of Oklahoma on election night.  There were a number of other bad results in addition to Obama's trouncing in the state.  Both corporation commissioner posts went to Republicans.  The State Senate went from a split chamber to Republican for the first time in state history, and Republicans increased their lead in the State House.  Even Sally Kerns, the State Representative who was caught twice by Capitol security for taking a handgun into the building and claimed that homosexuality is a greater threat to America than terrorism, handily won reelection.  I am pessimistic about the Democrats' chances for retaining the governorship and lieutenant governorship in 2010.  It's terrible.

You mention the digital divide, and it's real here, but even so, there are plenty of people with internet connections who were voting for Republicans.  One of the problems is that for much of the state, The Daily Oklahoman dominates the news.  It's possibly the most right-wing major paper in the nation.  (It's so right-wing that when For Better or Worse had the series of strips about a major character wrestling with his sexuality, the paper pulled it.  We liberals, and a fair share of moderates, refer to the paper as "The Daily Disappointment.")  There is no online news source for the state that really has any power.  The gates are being kept very well here.

As an aside, I think that the maps pictured actually align somewhat with the county maps from the primary election.

It Sounds Like You Folks Could Use Some Serious Outside Support (0.00 / 0)
I was a Fred Harris man back in 1976, so I would dearly love to see a progressive populist resurgence in Oklahoma.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Hey I can see my county! (0.00 / 0)
It's um, yeah. Dark red.

Montani semper liberi
the Bible Belt (0.00 / 0)
here in Oklahoma we have a diffeent name for that pink/red area where GOP strength grew, which is referred to above as Scotch-Irish or upland south...we call it the Bible Belt.
here in the Bible Belt, the most irrational forms of christianity abound. Palin is venerated more highly than the Virgin Mary.
Is that where the version of Christianity (0.00 / 0)
that teaches "hate thy neighbor" is clung to?
[ Parent ]
Not the Ozarks (4.00 / 1)
Paul, the Ozarks are not covered in any of the area you indicate.  Generally speaking, the Ozarks stretch from the Southern end of St. Louis in the Northeast, diagonally southwest across the state of Missouri and slightly into Kansas and Oklahoma, across Northwest Arkansas and back up to the the Eastern Missouri border with Kentucky.

You can see this clearly drawn at this map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

The vast majority of the Ozarks are in Missouri with most of the rest in Northwest Arkansas.  Even the areas of the Ozarks in Arkansas that went more red did so less than the rest of the state.

Sorry, but I'm from the Ozarks and have to defend it.

That is curious. (0.00 / 0)
Basically the Wal Mart corner, the upper northwest, is the bluest part of the state. What's up with that?

I spent the greater part of my childhood there, in Rogers.

Montani semper liberi

[ Parent ]
I'd rather be redeployed to Iraq (4.00 / 1)
than deployed to the Red Shift.
Red Shift/Blue Shift--A County-Level View | 40 comments
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