Superbelt

All are good, the county by county one that shows large swaths of red with dots of blue in it is one part of the story, but there are so many ways to show the data so you can get a real picture on the makeup of america and how we vote.
I'll start with this one

Best one I've see yet.
Shows you that republicans are relatively low population, but make up for it in area.
Democrats are small in the area but huge pinpoints of votes that make up the difference.

smooth

problem is that area garners electoral votes.

you know what that means?

I think you guys should shift to local strategies. start changing the state level apparatus--like dems are doing in california.

(stem cell anyone--stuff it george!)

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Superbelt

You're absolutely right. The Democrats ran the campaign from a nationwide perspective, the GOTV efforts were done by 527 organizations. Democrats do need to strengthen the state parties and get leaders who can do the work themselves. That's how the Republicans rebuilt after losing to Johnson.

smooth

I don't know how long it would take to regain national power. but with the high concentration in local areas, the dems can definately enact statewide legislature and harness the power of the rights discourse of State's Rights.

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Charlatan

It's interesting to see all that blue in the what most people are calling red areas... especially in southern Texas.

Also interesting to see how the urban vote is VERY blue.

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flstf

This map shows clearly what I have been reading over and over again on this board.
The cities are full of liberal elite, godless homosexual, left wing radicals.
And the countryside is full of god fearing, gay bashing, right wing gun nuts.

After all the votes are counted it only takes a few fence sitters going one way or the other to win a national election, LOL.

psyday

The only thing I hate about these maps is people act like there aren't republicans in the blue areas and there are no democrats in the red, which is ludicrous. There are very few of those areas where the win was a total landslide as if the other choice didn't even exist.

We're more of a melting pot than those maps show that we are.

Redlemon

I think it was SecretMethod70 who posted the Purple map. I copied it out, so here it is again:

Charlatan

The purple map certainly show just how split it was... facinating.

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ARTelevision

What is important to me about these illuminating maps is the influence of environment, culture, and experience on people's worldview.

I think we all need to honor and respect that more.

I know this is the deepest message I will take away from all this.

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flstf

It appears to me to be really split between cities and rural areas. Even in the states that Bush won most urban areas went to Kerry and visa versa.
The difference seems much more pronounced on the maps that actually show voting patterns within the states.

ARTelevision

That is the most general way to describe it, but there are socio-economic factors, historical ones as well.

What I mean to say is that not to honor and respect the fact that people from very different environments and with very different experiences have very differnt views of the world is to ignore the simple facts of anthropology and sociology and worse, to devalue actual life experience.

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Manx

The most interesting thing about the first map is the blue along the Mississippi. I had no idea.

But there seems to be a flaw in the map - Alaska looks like it has a high and flat population throughout it's borders. Almost as high as Denver.

It would be interesting to see this map with the shading of purples from the second map applied. As is, it polarizes too much.

SecretMethod70

I'm not sure what black means. I suppose their votes haven't been counted yet?

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Seaver

Sorry to take attention away from the intended, and very good, points of this thread, but LBJ never won. He inherited the presidency, but he never won.

irateplatypus

i'm almost certain black counties indicate a large Al Sharpton constituency...

oh wait, i mean... i think it indicates either missing or conflicting data.

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BigGov

Those are very interesting.

What I'd really like to see are those maps modified so each state is proportional to the number of electoral votes they have...except that would probably be very time consuming.

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_Yossarian

Ha.

Heres the best political map.

http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm

irateplatypus

the average Connecticut citizen is 20 points away from being Mensa qualified? hmm...

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~ Winston Churchill

_Yossarian

Hey man, I didn't write it, just found it.

SecretMethod70

It's also well-known to be totally fake.

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Sparhawk

Did you skip over the landslide election of '64 in history class? Or were you not paying attention? Goldwater... Daisy... George Wallace... Ring a bell?

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mrbuck12000

my favorite:



mrb

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Paq

i was gonna mention that, glad you pointed it out.

i also loved hte first map where it shows the disparity between city and rural voters...

innteresting indeed...

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Superbelt

Two more:
Here is Rush Limbaugh's favorite map.


here is that same map skewed for population, not area.

jwoody

In this map of the U.K. you can (well, I can because I know the geography) clearly see that urban areas tend to vote one way and the rural areas vote another.

One obvious difference between the U.K. map and the U.S. is that ours has a few more colours on it.



I fucking love maps, me.

ARTelevision

Superbelt - yep the skewed one is what counts.

I'm most interested in the cultural, environmental, experiential, and human differences. That's the map we need to look at and think about.

Thanks.

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roachboy

it is interesting to see the extent to which there is already a kind of symbolic conflict going on about the meaning of the election across the medium of maps.

and it is nice to see this thread, which tracks the conflict.

obviously, the right wants to use colored graphics to convince itself and the rest of us that there is more unanimity than anyone would otherwise think, given the actually existing results of the election. i am interested in this process. cool graphics did not help colin powell before the unsc in teh run-up to the iraq war--i suspect it will not help the right in tis attempts to claim for itself the single voice of "real america"...

the most interesting graphic i have seen so came in an email from someone where i teach---it juxtaposes the pre-civil war map of the us (1860) to the conservative color-scheme for the last election. it is interesting--stands teh meaning of the conservative graphics on their head. i am still trying to find another copy of it.

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ARTelevision

I don't think going into this with our old partisan views is really helpful at this point. Wouldn't it be more sensible to try again to understand each other better rather than state the old generalizations over and over?

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Superbelt

Art, I think these two maps should help you in your desire to understand the "cultural, environmental, experiential, and human differences." For this country.

roachboy, this is for you.

These two are especially important because of the intense social issues that we dealt with this year. Gay Marriage propelled Bush to victory, the social conservative nature and religious bedrocks of the old slave state regions territories still remains to this day.

ARTelevision

Superbelt, I see it differently.

My own personal take on this tends to see the term "morality" as an unintentional obfuscation. What I will pursue is the notion that "morality" is a code word for media influence. It is not such a stretch. I think many voters associate the large notion of "mass media' influence as an immoral or amoral force. And they voted their relationship to that.

My focus is on the effects of media influence upon the more urbanized vs. the more rural cultures of the US. I have a sense that those who live in urban cultures are more accepting of media influence as reflecting their own worldviews than those who live in more rural areas, who are motivated to reject perceived media influence. That is the cultural distinction I'll be addressing.

IMO - The other, more commonly expressed divisions - "morality" and homosexual rights, for example, are not at the core of this division. They are not the most basic reason for the cultural divisions we are experiencing.

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SecretMethod70

I completely agree, 100%.

As for the pre-civil war map, it fails to keep in mind that the majority of the reasons for the civil war had nothing to do with slavery. Neither side was particularly vehemently against it.

Furthermore, if you're going to make a geographical comparison like that, it's more appropriate to look at the counties map. The majority of geographic Illinois voted Republican, Idaho, which was in an anti-slavery territory, voted Republican, Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana voted Republican, North and South Dakota - both of which had half of their geographical area in an anti-slavery region - voted Republican, Maryland voted Democrat but was a slave state, as did Deleware. I think you get the point.

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roachboy

thanks superbelt....


art---i do not see why it is not possible to argue that there is a particular ideological offensive underway that has a particular origin

(like i said, i see the map question as an aspect of the right's attempts to make the election an expression of unanimous popular support in the "real america" as they see it)

without the argument necessarily presupposing that i am somehow myself "partisan"---the moves are specific, they have a function, that function serves the interest of a particular political position--they are not abstract, not general.

there is no sense to this question of control of the graphics that come to represent this election result in general. there are only tactics.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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SecretMethod70

I agree that the Republicans are distorting the truth in their focus on the unskewed county map. I do not see this particularly different, however, from sweeping generalizations that "red states" are filled with knuckle-dragging bigots. In fact, if I had to pick one side which was more respectable in their distortion, it would be the Republican spin.

I would have preferred Kerry to win over Bush as well, but it's no surprise that he lost when his most vocal supporters are people who will throw around maps of slave states and false representations of the "average IQ" of red and blue states to make the point that they were right. You will not win elections by insulting and denigrating those who hold different values and beliefs than you do.

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ARTelevision

roachboy, to move forward with me on this it will be necessary for us to agree that there are two particular ideological offensives underway that have particular origins.

They oppose each other at root levels and are the cause of the current sense of cultural division we experience.

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Stompy

Keep in mind that "Republican" back then was the complete 180 of the "Republicans" you have today.

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roachboy

art: ok.
keep in mind that i understand "the left" in the states as being organized on fundamentally different grounds than the right. the left such as it is is far more diffuse. the term, supreme in its vagueness, encompasses eveything from the dlc to folk like myself who operate in a space much closer to marxism.

maybe this is why i was confused by the label partisan.

anyway, the method problem is posed--the assymetry in the types of formations we are looking at. but try to suspend some of this tendency to name things i shall--but i cant promise that it will be consistent.

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it make you sick.

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SecretMethod70

what does that have to do with anything? I was showing that a significant handful of states which voted Republican TODAY were anti-slavery and that there were also states which voted Democratic TODAY which were pro-slavery.

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Charlatan

Art... an interesting take on the media.

The way I see it is that if you look at the population skewed maps they show the US population is greater in Urban centres than rural... Wouldn't it make sense then, the media (always looking for a greater base of eyes for their advertisers) would aim their content at that larger population?

In other words, the media would speak to the urban over the rural (by and large) because of the population base to be found in the urban centres.

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- Old Man Luedecke

ARTelevision

Yes, Charlatan. And now that roachboy has given his acceptance of the dualistic nature of the ideological offensives now underway, I'd reduce them to the effects of mass media upon the two major cultural/environmental divisions we experience today - the urban and the rural - and their attendant respective worldviews, as can be generally described.

This is the great experiment in which we're engaged. It is comparable to subjects' susceptibility or rejection to hypnosis based on the ability or willingness of a particular subject to suspend disbelief. I'm framing it this way to approach the cultural issues by means of aesthetic analysis. More later as I consider this...

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