RED AND BLUE COUNTIES NATIONALLY—WHY?
RED AND BLUE COUNTIES NATIONALLY—WHY? At the county level the pattern of urban blue areas and much larger, less-populated red areas has persisted for some time. Dick Weisfelder called my attention to it after the presidential election in 2004. Here is a map from a Scientific American slide show which illustrates the pattern. This breakdown is less often discussed than breakdowns by age, gender and ethnicity, but it seems to be strong and persistent. Why do rural people vote so differently from urban people? I haven’t seen much discussion of this.
I think that JFK in 1960 carried a lot of the states that Dewey carried in 1948 and that Nixon in 1960 carried a lot of the states that Truman carried. If that is so, then you could tell a story about candidates with a small town persona doing well in rural areas and vice versa. Candidates are aware of this effect; they stress any small town characteristics they have, from log cabins to pork rinds. [And that seems to suggest that being urban or eastern is perhaps more of a handicap than an image of “small-town.”]