Robert David Sullivan 2

Update: How the 10 Regions of American Politics voted on Tuesday

Preliminary results from the 10 Regions of American Politics are below, with more detailed data to come. Barack Obama has won six regions, taking South Coast away from the Republican column. That means he's won the five most urbanized regions (see earlier post), four of them by margins near or above 20 points, plus he hung on to the Democratic Party's last remaining region with a substantial number of "small town" voters (Chippewa).

The shift of Mega-Chicago and El Norte, which are now almost as Democratic as the Northeast Corridor and Upper Coasts, is significant. Mega-Chicago voted for Gerald Ford in 1976 and George H.W. Bush in 1988, and El Norte was one of Ronald Reagan's strongest regions in the 1980s. The GOP can't afford wipeouts in all four regions if it is to be competitive in 2012.

"New Hues for the Electoral Map"

POST-ELECTION UPDATE HERE.

My updated look at the "10 States of American Politics," below, is in the current issue of America magazine (written before John McCain apparently gave up on the state of Michigan). Besides being a very smart magazine, the Catholic weekly has an excellent election blog headed by Michael Sean Winters. (And if you're still under the delusion that Catholics are a monolithic voting bloc in the US, you need some serious education.)

Maps dividing the nation into blue states and red states fail to capture the real differences and contradicting trends within what have been called, facetiously, the United States of Canada and Jesusland. One alternative is the four-region model (Northeast, South, Midwest, West) long used by the U.S. Census Bureau. But what kind of political description would apply to a “Midwest” that stretches from Detroit to Dodge City? Or to a “South” that includes both George W. Bush’s best county in 2004 (Ochiltree, Tex.) and his worst (Washington, D.C.)—as well as Barack Obama’s best county (Jefferson, Miss.) and his worst (Magoffin, Ky.) in this year’s Democratic primaries?

For such reasons I have developed a 10-region model, shown on the map above. These regions are roughly equal in voting strength (each cast about 12 million votes in the 2004 election), but each has a distinct history and political bent. (You can find more detailed data here.)

This year Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, seems to be focused on three goals: Increase John Kerry’s narrow 2004 margin in the Hispanic-heavy region of El Norte (with the goal of winning Colorado and New Mexico and becoming competitive in Florida); erase the Republican Party’s customary solid lead in South Coast (winning Virginia and possibly North Carolina, plus going over the top in Florida); and reduce the Democrats’ often-huge deficit in Cumberland (allowing Obama to take Ohio and possibly Indiana).

Where the political earth moved in 1980

As Election Day nears, I'll be adding historical voting data to the site, particularly having to do with changes in each party's geographical base from year to year. (For maps showing county-by-county results for individual presidential elections, I recommend Dave Leip's Atlas site.) Below are maps and a chart showing the biggest changes in 1980, when Ronald Reagan took over the Republican Party after Gerald Ford's narrow loss in 1976. Reagan considerably increased the GOP share of the vote in the South and West, especially in rural areas. (See my Boston Globe column "The Reagan Realignment's Staying Power" for more on the long-term repercussions of the 1980 election.)

For definitions of the 10 States of American Politics, as well as links to data from other presidential elections, click here. For a massive Excel spreadsheet that includes county-by-county results for the 1976 election, click Download 1980returnsbycountysimple.xls (864.5K)

"10 Regions" primary totals after Kentucky and Oregon

I've included the unofficial returns from Kentucky and Oregon, and Barack Obama has now narrowly won Frontier, his fifth region in our 10 Political Regions model. His strongest region remains the South Coast, while Hillary Clinton's strongest region is Cumberland (which includes most of the almost-all-white Appalachian area that has been getting so much attention in recent weeks).

Obama is now ahead in the national popular vote by 160,000 votes if you don't count Michigan (where he wasn't on the ballot and both candidates pledged not to campaign), and Clinton is ahead by 168,000 votes if you do count Michigan. (Arguably, Obama's strength is understated in both cases because he did exceptionally well in caucus states, where the reported popular vote totals are much lower than in primary states.)

The recent primary results also reinforced the pattern by which Clinton does best in counties where George W. Bush significantly increased his share of the vote from 2000 to 2004 (perhaps Democratic voters in those counties overestimate Republican strength nationwide) and Obama does best in counties where Bush lost ground between 2000 and 2004 (perhaps those voters overestimate how easy it will be for the Democrats to win this year). The former category includes much of Kentucky, where Clinton won yesterday; the latter category includes a big chunk of Oregon, where Obama won.

Update: Democratic primary vote in the 10 regions

 

I've added the Pennsylvania results to the chart showing how Clinton and Obama have fared in our 10 political regions. For the first time, Obama leads in four regions, as his votes in Philadelphia and its suburbs push him to a narrow edge in the Northeast Corridor. And for the first time, Clinton's strongest region is not El Norte, as her sweep across central Pennsylvania makes Cumberland her most reliable base of votes. Note that Clinton has a narrow lead in the popular vote because the Florida and Michigan primaries, while nonbinding, are included here.

The lay of the land in Florida's Gold Coast

After looking at the map of the 10 States of American Politics, Brian wrote:

A friend suggested Broward County (FL) be included with Northeast Corridor, just as Miami-Dade was put with El Norte rather than with South Coast. Was this ever considered? Outside the Everglades, the county's density is over 4,000, voting tends to be heavily Democratic, and most residents are relocated from the Northeast Corridor.

That's a good point, and I did consider putting Broward with the Northeast Corridor, but I didn't want to make the map too complicated, and I wanted to take into account a longer time frame than the past two or three elections. As the chart below shows, Broward County, like the Northeast Corridor , has trended Democratic beginning in 1992. But Broward was closer to the South Coast during the 1960s through the 1980s -- swinging toward Richard Nixon in 1968, back to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, and then again to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. And South Coast, in contrast to Southern Inland, now looks like a swing region. If Broward gives the Democratic nominee a New York City-style landslide this fall while the South Coast goes Republican, I may change its region, but I think it's possible John McCain will do measurably better in Fort Lauderdale than on Long Island.

Miami-Dade County really is one of a kind. Its swing toward the GOP during the Reagan years, and the Republican Party's plunge in the 1990s, was a far more extreme version of what happened in the United States as a whole. It doesn't fit exactly in any region, but its imitation of a long-necked bird puts it closest to the South Coast and El Norte. But the fact that it's been solidly, if unspectacularly, Democratic in the last few elections makes it a better fit with El Norte.

And as proof that the three "Gold Coast" counties of Florida have distinctive personalities, here is how they compare with each other.

Finally, here are the stats reflected in the charts above.

Where the political earth moved in 1976

 

In our journey through recent presidential elections, we come to 1976, the high-water mark for the Democratic Party over the past 40 years and the last time that party won the South. (Go here for explanations of our 10 regions and links to data from other election years.) Georgia's Jimmy Carter won six of our 10 political regions and ran about 18 points ahead of Hubert Humphrey's showing in 1968 -- when Dixiecrat George Wallace ran strongly in the former Confederate states.

The one region where Carter ran worse than Humphrey did was the Upper Coasts, which may have been cool toward a religious Southerner with a rural sensibility. He made improvements in the less populated counties of the region but lost ground in the vote troves of Boston, Hartford, Portland (both Maine and Oregon), San Francisco, and Seattle, and he lost the Humphrey states of Connecticut, Maine, and Washington. As the Republican Party gained strength in the South, the Democrats would grow increasingly reliant on the Upper Coasts, but it would take a while for the party to become dominant there.

Carter's gain was less impressive when compared with 1960, the last competitive race with only two major candidates. He did much better than John F. Kennedy in most of the South, and especially in border states such as Kentucky and Tennessee, but he fell behind in most of the North.

The biggest drop for the Democrats between 1960 and 1976 was in Mega-Chicago, which switched from Kennedy to Republican Gerald Ford. Again, Carter made some gains in rural areas but was weaker than Kennedy in such major cities as Chicago and Detroit. Despite unimpressive showings in Milwaukee and St. Louis, however, he was able to carry Wisconsin and Missouri by doing well in the Southern Inland and Chippewa parts of those states.

Overall, Carter got just over 50 percent of the vote against Ford, thanks to heavy support in the South.

In particular, Carter got 58 percent in the Southern Inland region; no Democrat has one a majority there since Carter headed the party.

Carter racked up his biggest margins against Ford in large cities, following the pattern of all Democrats, but there were more red splotches on the raw-vote map than is usual in a Democratic year. It was Carter's rural popularity that allowed him to narrowly overcome his lack of appeal in major suburban counties.

In Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois, the heavy Republican vote in the suburbs kept Carter from winning the electoral votes of those states. But he narrowly carried Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where secondary urban areas (such as Youngstown, Pittsburgh, and Madison) compensated for large Republican counties.

Where the political earth moved, 1968

In our survey of recent presidential elections, we now reach 1968, which this year could be a scary historical parallel for either Republicans (incumbent party collapses in the midst of an unpopular war) or Democrats (party isn't able to recover from a bitter and protracted nomination fight). The first map shows the drop in support for the Democratic nominee from Kennedy in 1960 (49.7% of the vote) to 1968 (42.7%). The drop is greatest in the South and the interior West. You can see today's Democratic base (Northeast, upper Midwest, West Coast) in the areas where Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey kept his party's losses to a minimum. Also, the patches of green in the Deep South represent areas where voter participation among blacks went up significantly between 1948 and 1968.

The second map compares the vote for Richard Nixon in 1968 with the vote for Republican Tom Dewey in 1948 -- the previous election with a strong Dixiecrat candidate (Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace in 1968).

Though Nixon won in 1968, he ran 1.7 points behind Dewey's losing percentage in 1948 (going from 45.1% to 43.4%). But he increased the Republican percentage in four of our 10 regions, with the biggest jump in South Coast, where he went from 31.4% to 39.6% -- enough to carry the region in a three-way contest. Nixon carried four states in the region that went for Harry Truman in 1948: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. For the most part, they would remain part of the Republican base through the 2004 election.

The next map shows where Nixon ran best overall in 1968; keep in mind that 43% was enough for a victory that year. Essentially, this map shows what was left of the Republican base in the North after first Franklin Roosevelt and then John F. Kennedy chipped away at it. This is also before Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan filled in much of that blank space in the South and gave the GOP a new governing majority.

Next are two maps showing where Nixon and Humphrey got their biggest raw vote majorities (against each other, not considering votes for Wallace). In the inset map, note Illinois and Missouri, two states that switched from Democratic in 1960 to Republican eight years later; Nixon rolled up big majorities in the "collar counties" around Chicago in 1968, as well as in suburban St. Louis County, that outweighed Humphrey's big-city margins in those states.

And here's where George Wallace ran strongest in 1968. His base was mostly, but not entirely in the Confederate South, but he did better in the interior than on the Atlantic Coast.

 

Where the political earth moved in 1960

As we move into the 1960 election (see previous post on the 1948 election), one of our 10 States of American Politics clearly comes into view. The Northeast Corridor had been part of the Republican base since the Civil War, and Republican Tom Dewey carried it by some 25,000 votes over Harry Truman in 1948, but it went strongly for Democrat John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon 12 years later. Kennedy got 54.2 percent of the vote here, running almost exactly 8 points ahead of Truman. Nationally, Kennedy got 49.7 percent of the vote, or just one-tenth of a point more than Truman. Most importantly in terms of the Electoral College, Kennedy won six Northeastern states that Dewey had carried in 1948: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Without them, he would have lost badly to Nixon. The map of the Northeast Corridor shows that Kennedy won this region -- and the election -- by greatly increasing the Democratic share of the votes in the suburbs around New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. And ever since, these counties have been increasingly important for Democratic presidential nominees.

Here's the national map of the vote swing between 1948 and 1960. Note that Kennedy greatly increased the Democratic vote in parts of the Deep South, but that was because Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had pushed down the Democratic vote so much in 1948; the Democrats' recovery here would be short-lived. More important, in the long run, would be the drop in the Democratic vote in fast-growing areas of the West.

Here's the national picture of Kennedy's share of the vote by county.

And here's the raw vote margin. Note the patches of blue in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas -- all states that Kennedy narrowly carried.

Four maps: 1948 vs. 2004

As we progress through the presidential election year, I'll be posting maps and spreadsheets showing how American political geography has changed over the past 60 years, and how those trends went into the making of the 10 Political Regions map. First, here are four very basic maps comparing 1948 with 2004 in terms of the percentage received by Democratic candidates in each county, and also in terms of the raw-vote margin between the two major parties. (Note that the Democratic vote in four states in 1948 -- Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina -- was mostly siphoned off by Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond.) I'll be filling adding maps that show what went on between these two elections, as well as close-ups of geographical regions.

UPDATE: See 1960 maps here.