14 maps on how the Democrats and Republicans carved up America

My newest project at America magazine details when each county in the U.S. adopted its current political hue.

From the intro:

If this year’s presidential election is at all competitive, we will see the major candidates zero in on a handful of “battleground” states and ignore most of the United States. The red-versus-blue electoral map has changed little since achieving iconic status in 2000; all but 10 states have repeated their choice of party three times. A slight majority of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States have voted the same way over the past seven elections; at the county level, the current red-versus-blue map was mostly written by 1988, when the first president Bush defeated Michael Dukakis.

Mitt Romney won 2,090 counties by at least 10 points, and President Obama won 468 counties (mostly larger and more urban) by at least 10 points—leaving 557 counties that could be considered “purple” by the most generous definition. It would take a landslide this fall to shake many of the counties out of their decades-old voting habits. The maps below illustrate how the current political map has evolved over the past century, showing when each country slipped into the groove it inhabited in 2012. 

See the entire project here.

Comments

[Mianfeinan]

In the 2004 election, were the rural counties Kerry picked up mostly ski resort counties where fear of climate change destroying livelihoods would be widespread??

This would be especially plausible in California’s Alpine and Mono Counties. Alpine County constitutes an interesting story since it had before 2004 voted Democratic only twice – in FDR’s two landslides of 1932 and 1936 – over one hundred and forty years since 1861.

Bill Clinton and Carter seem to have achieved no so abrupt turnaround from long runs of voting Republican. What county had the longest run of voting Republican before Bill Clinton won it?

Wyoming’s Teton County – in the reddest state in the nation – is another ski resort county that turned blue in 2004. Orleans and Caledonia Counties in Vermont, and several in Colorado would seem similar. Minnesota’s Cook County is another possible case: though Bush in 2000 is the only Republican to win it since 1984, it voted Democrat only once between 1952 and 1984 and had a variable history before 1932 with strong support for Socialists and Progressives.