This is the final part of three posts analyzing the congressional districts President Barack Obama underperformed in. It will focus on the movement in Appalachia and the South Central United States. The previous parts can be found starting here.
The 2010 Midterms
Let's take one last look at those districts in which Mr. Obama did worse than Senator John Kerry:
One sees again, as clear as ever, the diagonal pattern of Republican movement in South Central America and the Appalachians.
These districts differ from the northeastern and Florida-based regions examined in the previous post. Unlike those congressional districts, the districts in South Central and Appalachia vote strongly Republican.
This is the first part of three posts analyzing the congressional districts President Barack Obama underperformed in. The second part can be found here.
Congressional Districts
By most accounts, Senator Barack Obama dominated the 2008 presidential election. He won an electoral landslide, winning Republican-leaning states such as Indiana and North Carolina which his campaign targeted. Compared to 2004, the nation shifted almost ten points more Democratic.
Mr. Obama improved from Senator John Kerry's performance almost everywhere. More than 90% of congressional districts voted more Democratic than in 2004. Yet this means that at least several dozen congressional districts were more friendly to Mr. Kerry than the Illinois Senator. I have mapped these districts below:
In the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election, the New York Times famously posted a map depicting county-by-county changes from the 2004 election:
What is remarkable about this map is the evenness of the Democratic movement - a 9.72% shift to them from 2004. With the exception of a diagonal patch of Appalachia, President Barack Obama improved throughout the country. It did not matter if a county was located in Utah or California, whether it belonged to a dense city or a thinly populated farm, or whether it was poor or rich - almost every county still voted more Democratic than it did in 2004.
If one moves to a statewide basis, the shift is still fairly uniform.
It's been somewhat fashionable amongst the Washington beltway to classify the past few decades as an era dominated by the Republican Party, at least on the presidential level. According to this view, Republican presidential dominance started under President Ronald Reagan, who initiated the Reagan Revolution. Since then America has been under continuous Republican hegemony, interrupted only by the centralist term of President Clinton. In light of the 2008 Democratic victory, holders of this idea sometimes assert that President Obama has initiated a new era of Democratic presidential dominance.
The idea of Republican presidential dominance, however, fares poorly when compared to the evidence:
This is part of an analysis of the swing state Pennsylvania. Part three can be found here.
(A note: There will be a lot of maps in this post.)
Philadelphia: Precinct Results
My first post on the swing state Pennsylvania focused on the city Philadelphia, an incredibly Democratic city. At the time, I looked for detailed ward and precinct results but was unable to find any. Recently, however, I have come across a website which maps Philadelphia precinct results across a whole range of elections; it is a literal gold mine. This offers the opportunity to substantially deepen the previous analysis.
Below is a map of the 2008 presidential election in Philadelphia (by precinct!)
An analysis of this result below.
The November 2008 election saw dramatic increases in participation by traditionally underrepresented groups, including Americans of color and young voters, according to a new research memorandum released by Project Vote yesterday.
On Thursday, Kos posted a diary listing the states that fell into three categories of shift in voting margin for president from 2004 to 2008: those that had shifted to the GOP, those that showed no shift, and those that shifted to the Dems by 10 or more points. I took those states and compared them to the Gallup Party ID shifts from 2002 to 2008, and this is what I came up with:
There were 12 other states which also shifted Democratic by 10 or more points in party ID from 2002 to 2008. This is the strongest indication that the partisan vote shift over 6 years significantly exceeded the presidential vote shift from 2005 to 2008.
Hey folks, I wanted to share my latest column with everyone here at OpenLeft -- a review of Bernard Goldberg's latest book, "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media".
-K
That certainly didn't take long. Just shy of a week after Barack Obama took the oath of office, becoming America's 44th president, the nation's foremost right-wing publishing house has released a new tome by Bernard Goldberg that seeks to trash the supposedly liberal "mainstream media" for being in the tank for Obama.
The three-ringed circus of liberal media bias cryptozoology is nothing new for Goldberg. He's been part of this factually challenged freak show for years. This isn't even his first book on the subject -- he wrote 2001's creatively titled, Bias.
At DKos yesterday, Jed L posted the following map in a FP diary "Obama Won 197 Of 196 Battleground EVs": It's a map of supposed "battleground states" from the Washington Post's Dan Balz and Alec Macgillis on June 8, 2008:
As Jed L notes, Obama did indeed win more battleground EVs than the Post had identified just over a week after Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination. And therein lies a tale quite opposed to the current narrative of a "center-right nation."
We've all seen this county-level map, showing how isolated the shift toward the GOP was since 2004, against the much broader pro-Obama tide:
But this past week, Professor Charles Franklin, of Political Arithmetik and Pollster.com, has added considerably more to the picture of how broad Obama's win was, first by looking at race, then by looking at different demographic groups. Details on the flip.
Beyond the sheer mendacity of the 'center-right nation' meme, there lies serious discussion of whether the election we just had is, indeed a realigning election. The mendacious meme and the serious discussion are clearly related: if this was a realignment, then we can say, "Well, maybe it was a center-right nation, but it isn't anymore." There's just one problem: no one can quite agree on what a realigning election is. I can sympathize with this confusion, have struggled with it myself, but I've come to a embrace the view that realigning elections can only be understood by their place in the periodic cycles of American party systems-as I'll briefly recap on the flip.
On Tuesday, at DKos, DemFromCT called attention to two similarly-themed pieces that stopped short of calling 2008 a realignment-but did so on what I regard as dubious grounds:
Stu Rothenberg and Jay Cost have interesting pieces up about the realignment idea. Based on Obama's historic win, they both see this as more than a usual election, and less than a realignment.
Rothenberg's approach is to look at the good news for the Dems, say, "that's a lot," and then look at the not-so-good news, and say, "but there should be more if it's a realignment." Cost's approach eschews the term "realignment." Instead, he compares this election with 1860, 1896 and 1932, and concludes that it doesn't compare. While both writers make some good points, they miss both the complexity and the simplicity of a realignment. The complexity is that they are messy things, they don't always look the same. The simplicity is that one thing is certain: you can never go back again.
David's done yoeman's work here-and elsewhere-documenting the pernicious Versailles meme that despite the stunning victory won by Obama and Democrats running for Congress, America "remains a center-right nation" and therefore Obama must not enact his planned agenda. I finally got to the end of the 98-page post-election Democracy Corps report, "The Change Election Awaiting Change", and on page 94, I found something directly relevant to this pernicious Versailles meme: the American people overwhelmingly believe the exact opposite: that Republicans should give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and try to work with him to acheive his agenda.
Indeed, this sentiment is much more far-reaching than the core support for Obama's agenda in the first place. The reason is simple: the American people believe in democracy, they believe in elections, and they believe in giving their elected leaders (not the unelected Versailles punditalkcrazy) the opportunity to act on their electoral mandates. Here's the finding (click for a fill-width version):
As Media Matters pointed out, Brent Bozell is a little confused over whether Obama is a socialist or a Reaganite Conservative.
Socialist (From the October 27 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends):
BOZELL: This is the arrogance, I think, of the Obama campaign, but it's a well-placed arrogance in the sense that they've gone through this entire campaign without being questioned seriously by anyone except for this news network, the Fox News network, which is why they studiously avoid the Fox News network. But when you go through the entirety of the campaign saying the kind of things that you're saying in the debates, where on, for every question, you've got a redistribution of wealth answer, where you've got socialism, where you've got the government controlling every aspect of life. You don't expect a reporter to ask you, "Is this socialism?" Because the media don't ask that question. Well, some uppity reporter did -- and look what happened, they cancelled her. And, by the way, she won't be going to the ball, either.
Reaganite Conservative (From the November 7 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom):
BOZELL: There's a lot of work that needs to be done. But here's the key thing, Bill, that really isn't being reported: Anyone who looks at the exit polls this year will find two fascinating results. Number one, this country remains every bit as center-right as it's been for a generation. And number two --
HEMMER: You don't think that's changed -- you don' think that's changed at all?
BOZELL: No, it hasn't. Look at the exit polling. The number one issue was the economy, nothing came close. The American people are fiscally conservative, and the fascinating thing, Bill, is that Barack Obama ran as a Reaganite and won over the fiscal -- the public as a fiscal conservative. That's what the polling data shows.
HEMMER: You said there were two things. What was number two?
BOZELL: Well, number one is that the public is conservative; number two, Barack Obama won as a conservative. That means that Barack Obama does not have the mandate to enact the left-wing agenda he wants to enact. He didn't run on it, he ran from it. So, this is not necessarily bad news for conservatives.
But what happens if we just ignore the confusion, and go with #2? What does a Reaganite Conservative look like these days?
So, John McCain has taken to calling Barack Obama a "socialist". Why? Because Obama wants to "redistribute" the wealth. Of course, every time you tax someone, you redistribute wealth. And every time that government spends some money that benefits someone, that, too, redistributes wealth. By McCain's criteria, every government that ever existed in human history was "socialist." You might think that's sort of a whacked-out extremist position, somewhere two football fields to the right of the John Birch Society. And you'd be right. Because by John McCain's standards, I'd like to introduce you to four of the most prominent members of the Republican Socialists of America:
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