Another interesting map

[womzilla]

Via Atrios.

If you go to this page at the NY Times and run the flash map, there's a set of buttons on the left side--State Winners, County Bubbles, County Leaders, and Voting Shifts. This last one is the most interesting--it shows how the 2008 voting compared, county-by-county, to the previous four elections.

There's a coherent band of counties--not states, counties--that runs down the southern Appalachians, across Tennessee and Arkansas, reaching west into eastern Oklahoma and dipping down into western Louisiana--which constitutes basically all of the counties which were significantly more "red" in 2008 than in 2004. (There are a couple of other smaller patches--Arizona, eastern Massachusetts, northern Gulf Coast Florida--but the Appalachia/Ozarks band is really pronounced.) Even in the Deep South, once you get out of the mountains, most of the counties were noticeably "bluer" in 2008 than in 2004.

So, that's one small thing the pundits were right about--Obama had trouble with the hillbillies.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What's also interesting is where Obama's growth has been the largest. Not just in heavily black areas, but also the greatest part of rural Indiana, eastern North Dakota, the cow counties of Nevada where he spent so much time, and the Hispanic-growth areas of the Southwest outside of Arizona, where McCain did rather poorly on an absolute scale, but surely better than he would have were it not his state.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

DailyKos ran a similar map (maybe the same data). What's interesting about this one is using the slider to compare 2008 with 1996, then 2000, then 2004. Most of the country is more Republican than it was under Clinton, but the demographics changed the other way under Bush Lite. The trend lines that worked against Gore worked in favor of Obama.

My guess is that Bush really screwed up the GOP for a while. By doing everything the conservatives wanted, he did nothing that the conservatives promised. You can't fool all the people all the time...