Mapping the Election

By Tom Engelhardt

Let’s start with an electoral
map (scroll down) of the United States not long after George Bush beat a
Massachusetts liberal for the presidency. If you take a quick glance at it, you’ll
note that sea of blue stretching majestically from coast to coast with
just a few isolated red states hanging off the northern border like the last
ripe mangos of the growing season. Sound like the fabulous fantasy of some cockeyed
Kerry supporter? Actually, it represents a distant reality — and not even one
that you have to approach via some Star-Trek-style worm hole into an alternate
political universe. You just have to go back 16 years to 1988 when George H.
W. Bush pummeled Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in a presidential race.
Back in those days, as you might now have guessed, the blue states on the electoral
map were Republican and the reds Democratic. (Someday, some enterprising young
cultural scholar will tell us when, how, and why those colors were flipped and
what it all means.) That map of a political stomp-fest is actually a reminder
for all Democrats that the political world at the presidential level hasn’t always
rolled directly downhill. In 1988, even massive fraud by the Democrats wouldn’t
have helped.

Since 1988, however, we’ve entered a world of ever more extreme, polarizing words
and images. Just this week, for instance, Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones
University, wrote in a
letter to George W. Bush:
"In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn’t
deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate.
We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet.
Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of
voice eagerly. Don’t equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let
it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise
your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you."

In the right-wing
Human Events on-line, there’s even a "modest proposal," filled with the
usual levels of anger, resentment, and a sense of eternal victimhood, that
calls for expelling the "liberal states" from the U.S. complete with instructions
on how to do it. ("If the so-called ‘Red States’ [those that voted for George
W. Bush] cannot be respected or at least tolerated by the ‘Blue States’ [those
that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry], then the most disparate of them must
live apart — not by secession of the former [a majority], but by expulsion
of the latter.") In the meantime, a rejiggered
map that shows North America divided into "The United States of Canada" and "Jesusland" —
one of a number of similar embittered joke maps — has been zipping around
the Internet among disappointed anti-Bush and/or Kerry voters.

I had my own polarizing moment, however, back in that extreme red/blue year of
1988. Not long after the election, looking at that pathetic little string of
red Democratic states at the northern edge of our national map, I had an urge
— which turned out to be a few years ahead of its time — and wrote my first
piece for the Nation magazine. I invented two Canadian political scientists
who, I claimed, had produced a massive pre-election report suggesting a logical
political realignment of North America, incorporating those Dukakis states into
an enlarged liberal Canadian commonwealth. (It turned out to be a realistic enough
sounding scenario even then for a Canadian Broadcasting Company interviewer to
call me looking for the two — quite fictional — scholars, having been unable
to track them down either at their nonexistent institute in Toronto or at their
home university in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.) I thought, you hardcore weekend
Tomdispatchers might find this peek into my archival past amusing and perhaps
still of interest in the present context. Even then, as you’ll see, I was quite
aware that this country was far more complex than any map filled with red-and-blue
blocs of color could possibly begin to indicate.

Analysis of the 2004 election began pouring in from all quarters even before
the counting ended; certainly before we could think straight about what had actually
happened. I’ve generally found far more illuminating the many varieties of electoral
maps that have begun to circulate. They do a better job of indicating how much
more complex and confusing we are as a nation than any single electoral-college
map could begin to catch. (Even these maps, focused as they are on the vote,
can’t catch the complexities, ambiguities, and confusions with which Americans
— those who did — went to the polls to make what, after all, is a black-or-white,
red-or-blue choice). So let me just offer a little tour of these first post-election
remappings of America, some of which might give you hope and others throw you
into despair.

Here, as a start, is the
essential red-and-blue map of this election. (Above it, you can click on
and check out the red/blue configurations of elections from 1980 on. If you’re
a Democrat and want to know what true depression is, try 1980 or 1984!) But red-and-blue
blocs actually tell you remarkably little. So try checking out where Bush and
Kerry votes actually
came from. You need to squint at these two maps a bit, but what you can see
is that the split is less state by state than urban versus suburban and rural.
Kerry, for instance, lost Missouri but carried St. Louis; lost Tennessee but
carried Memphis; was crushed in Alabama but carried Selma; was dismantled in
Texas but carried Austin and El Paso; won
California but lost large rural and suburban hunks of the state, and so on. Sean
Wilentz considered these splits in a recent Los Angeles Times Sunday
opinion piece: "The real electoral division," he wrote, "isn’t between the coasts
and the heartland. It’s between cities all over the United States and the rest
of the country...By perpetuating the easy impression of a nation divided into coastal
liberals and heartland conservatives, reporters and commentators are misleading
themselves and their audiences about the actual political state of the Union." (However,
the inclination of analysts to lump the rural and suburban vote together in the
Republican column and think of it all in the context of some kind of metro/retro
split probably makes little sense either. Whatever the Republican suburbs are
— a subject to which Tomdispatch will return in a few weeks — they can’t be
dismissed simply as "retro.")

As soon as you consider the vote county
by county, the look of the red/blue configurations begins to change dramatically
— even more so, if counties are essentially not awarded in toto to either candidate.
Then you end up with a "purple
America" map that begins to take into account the Bush voters in New York
City and the Kerry voters in deepest Texas. If you’re really curious, scroll
down two maps and try your luck at matching the purple electoral map against
a dark-sky snapshot of electricity-use nationwide or simply check out a basic
red-and-blue map rescaled
for population (scroll down).

Or — to return to red-and-blue America — here are a couple of other ways to
go at it: Consider what 2004 would have looked like in electoral-college terms
if only voters 18-29 had
trooped to the polls (scroll down). It would, of course, have been a Kerry electoral
landslide. Or to slice into the electoral map on a different angle, check out
a red-and-blue
on-the-dole map of the states that do (and don’t) take in more federal dollars
than they pay out in taxes. It’s essentially a 2004 election map since "17 of
the 20... states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes
paid are Red [Bush] States."

By the way, if you have an extra moment, check out Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest
piece, The
Faith Factor, in the Nation magazine in which she argues that the "great
awakening" of Christian "moral values" in Bush’s America isn’t exactly what it’s
made out to be. "What these churches have to offer," she writes, "in addition
to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They
have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on ‘faith’
but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients." In other words, while attempting
to dismantle one kind of welfare state, the President’s "moral majority" has
been hard at work building up another (far more modest) version of the same inside
the churches. As anyone knows who remembers those classic jobs-and-votes Democratic
political machines in big cities like New York or Chicago, there’s nothing better
for creating essential loyalty at the polls.

As if to support Ehrenreich’s position on the "moral values" debate, a
map in this Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review accompanying a Pam Belluck
article, To
Avoid Divorce Move to Massachusetts, shows that the lowest divorce rates
in the nation are "largely in the blue states" of the Northeast and upper Midwest.
Go figure.

Or how about putting the 48% of America that officially voted for Kerry in a
global context? Though this
map isn’t completely accurate — preferences in some Asian countries like
India and the Philippines seem to have been more mixed than it indicates — you’ll
get the idea.

Then there are other curious questions maps can raise. For instance, a map floating
around the e-universe in recent days shows Pre-Civil
War Free vs. Slave States. It is indeed an eerie historical snapshot. Throw
in the "territories open to slavery" (and southern Ohio) and you essentially
have the blue-red divide again. Perhaps this is a reminder that the great vote
switch of our times wasn’t religious at all. It started with President Richard
Nixon’s decision to pursue a "southern strategy" (based, in part, on seeing the
strength of segregationist Governor George Wallace’s third-party presidential
bid in 1968 in which he garnered 46 electoral votes and about 13% of the popular
vote). It was meant to drive a wedge right into the greatest of all New Deal
Democratic Party contradictions — the long-lived, increasingly uneasy alliance
of the northern liberal and southern white conservative wings of the Party. The
switch-over of this once racist vote flipped the South finally into the "red" camp
and, to this day (however updated), proves decisive in election after election,
especially as in 2004 in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The 2004
electoral map probably does tell us that, under the endless layers of a quarter-century
of "culture wars" and "moral issues," including those of abortion and gay marriage,
lies the heavy historical burden of America’s slave past and racial history.

Recently, outside observer Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Professor of African Studies
and History at Pennsylvania State University — "I could not but be amused wondering
what American commentators would say if this were an African election: I bet
they would bemoan the regionalization of voting as a reflection of Africans incapacity
to transcend primordial loyalties based on ‘tribalism’ and ‘regionalism’; voting
misdeeds would be ascribed to the propensity of African governments for vote
rigging and the ignorance of ’illiterate’ voters unaccustomed to democracy." —
took up this subject. In "The Republicanization of America," an essay not available
on line, he wrote in part:
"It seems to me that this drift, what I would call the republicanization of America,
can be attributed to the complex and combustible politics of race, empire, and
globalization... The cultural values trumpeted by the Republicans and which find
so much resonance among millions of Americans primarily tap into the racial codes
of American life and are driven by the desire to unravel the civil rights settlement
of the 1960s that sought to enfranchise and empower African Americans and other
racial minorities... The politics of race ensured unity on the Republican side
in this "war" (the party remains predominantly white and in the recent election
attracted no more than 10 percent of the black vote), and dissension on the Democratic
side as different identity and social projects competed for primacy (as can be
seen in the heated debates about gay rights in the African American civil rights
community)."

The one factor that might be impossible to map, so deep does it lie under the
surface of American electoral consciousness, is the imperial factor. (Speaking
of historical ironies, by the way, the racist southern senators of that old,
white Democratic South tended to be far more anti-imperial and anti-interventionist,
often for the obvious racial reasons, than the new right-wing senators of the
Republican South.) If the harsh racial maps of electoral America are officially
buried in the past, perhaps it would be reasonable to say that the imperial ones
are "buried" in the future. Though most Americans don’t think of themselves or
their country in imperial terms, it’s been clear in these last years that fears
of a loss of supremacy abroad and what that might mean domestically have risen
dramatically (even if overly focused on the single issue of terrorism and couched
in the language of patriotism). My own belief is that there was an imperial vote
in this election, a vote gripped by fear for what might be lost in the world.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/11/11_517.html