This is the Presidential electoral map just after the Conventions.
It IS the southern and rural states voting Republican. There may be fewer people in these states, but it seems they actually turn out to vote.
The lighter colors are inconclusive and where this election will be won or lost. I don’t know why there are gray states in this analysis.
Hearing the drumbeat of drilling, pipelines, mining, coal power and remote nuclear sites is not unlike urban Americans hoping for crime reduction, child and health care, food safety….
“Look’, barks a Republican Congressman, “We’re gonna take advantage of our natural resources. We’re gonna take advantage of the things that we were God-given in this land. We’re gonna take advantage of our oil reserves, of our natural gas, of our abundance of coal.”
Americans in cities have competing needs, but for either political party, shaping their plank is one way they hope to get you to the polls.
Bill Moyers recently broadcast perhaps the nation’s top political analysts Merle and Earl Black to help us understand “the importance of demographics in predicting and understanding voting patterns in different states and regions”.
“Well, you can’t understand the nation just by looking at national outcomes. Because America’s too diverse.’”
Notice Alaska is not a shoe-in for Sarah?
Alaska isn’t really very hard to understand. It consists of a minority that loves the wilderness and an overwhelmingly Republican majority that wants to squeeze all the cash it can get out of the state before the oil dries up, the fish die out and the wildlife disappears. Nowhere else does the Republican formula of manipulating the suckers by playing on their silly hatreds and even sillier vanities play out more clearly than in Alaska.
How diverse is America?
“I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.” – John McCain