Well, Obama won, and the Democrats cleaned up in Senate and House elections. But here's the thing: American elections are usually predetermined by demographic and social trends in various parts of the country. It's just that you can't tell how in advance. Only by looking back can you see what happened and make some guesses about why.
Jay Cost provided some of the best empirical analysis of national and local trends in last year's election. He is now teaming up with Sean Trende to analyze the actual results. The first installment is current available at RealClearPolitics. Cost and Trende use Census Bureau divisions of the country into regions and sub-regions. In part one they focus on the West South Central (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas) and the East South Central (Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky).
Here is a summary of their findings:
For the last thirty years, Republicans have consistently performed better here than they have nationwide - but when the GOP's fortunes decline nationally, candidates could expect a similar decline in the South Central. This trend was disrupted in the last election. Although John McCain did much worse than Bush nationwide, he only did slightly worse in the South Central.
What Cost and Trende find is that Obama did better than John Kerry among Black and Hispanic voters, and thus did a bit better in the region. But he lost ground among White voters, and especially among poorer, rural Whites.
While McCain's victories here were not surprising, they do carry some significance. After all, for the last twenty years (counting George H.W. Bush as a Texan, given that he began his political career there), the Chief Executive of the nation has hailed from the West South Central division - and the overlap between Clinton and Bush's voting coalitions here seems to have been pretty significant. Clinton was able to forge a coalition in this part of the country that united African Americans with lower income, rural/small town whites. Bush brought many of the latter into a coalition built upon the Republican base. So, while they don't get much press, these voters have, in a strange way, been ruling the roost for twenty years.
But this era is now over. Even as much of the rest of America swung toward Obama and the Democrats - these voters stuck with the Republican Party. In fact, it appears the GOP actually won a few more of them. For almost twenty years, you could say that the "first choice" of these swing voters would become President, but that's no longer the case. That seems pretty significant.
That is interesting. It may bode well for the Democrats in the next decade. But maybe not. Let's see the rest of the show. Meanwhile, check out this charter of counties won by Republican Presidential candidates (red) and Democrats:
That's pretty clear! The Hispanic fringe of Texas and the African American river corridors go Democrat. Everything else goes Republican. The only thing I am not sure about is that blue cummerbund Alabama is wearing. But maybe you can find a clue here and here.
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