Geography of US Elections

Download Lecture 3 via Tunes U in high resolution or, watch theYouTube version below.

As we saw in this week’s lecture, the electoral geography of the U.S. was relatively stable from the Civil War until the 1930s (and to some extent until the 1950s), with the Northeast and Pacific coast generally aligning with the Republicans and the Southeast with the Democrats, while the “middle band” in the eastern half of the country (typified by Ohio) acted as perennial swing states and the interior West (Great Plains and Rockies) periodically switched allegiance in a wholesale manner.  In 2000 and 2004, at the state level, the same general geographical pattern held, but with the parties reversed.  In the current election, it looks as if the Pacific Coast and Northeast will hold solid for the Democrats, while a number of interior western states might swing in the same direction.  As a result, several Democratic Party strategists now argue that the Republican Party may be in the process of restricting itself to its southern base.  On the county level, however, the geographical split is not so clear-cut: under the old regime, virtually every county in Michigan voted Republican; now most Michigan countries still vote Republican, but the state as a whole is in the Democratic camp.

But why has such a state-level geographical reversal occurred?  Is it mostly because the two parties have changed, or it more a factor of the regions themselves changing?

Although it is a moot exercise, I often wonder what prominent figures of the past would make of today’s political landscape.   William Jennings Bryan would would no doubt find the Republican Party’s cultural stance appealing, but he would probably be horrified by its economic and foreign policies. T. Roosevelt would probably cheer on John McCain’s foreign policies, but he would likely be horrified by Sarah Palin’s brand of cultural politics. Grover Cleveland, on the other hand, might well be a Ron Paul supporter.  I think the general response, however, would be one of perplexity.

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Download Lecture 1 via iTunesU

Welcome to the Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections. In this forum, we will discuss any aspect of electoral geography that you find interesting or pertinent. I have found from teaching several courses for Stanford Continuing Studies that members of the class often know more about particular topics than I do, and I am sure that the same is true for the global audience of iTunes U. Please join the discussion so that we can all learn from each other.

The overriding issue of contemporary American electoral geography is that of polarization. Is the United States a land of deep and almost unbridgeable political divisions that are closely linked to specific parts of the country, or is it predominantly a nation of political centrists, with most regions containing balanced populations of moderates, liberals, and conservatives? Good arguments can be made for both positions – and for the notion that the situation is too complex to be described in such terms.

A more specific question concerns Andrew Gelman’s finding that wealthy states tend to vote for the Democratic Party whereas wealthy people tend to vote for the Republican Party. As we saw in lecture, some evidence suggests that this basic pattern holds for California as well, where wealthy counties voted for John Kerry and poor counties voted for George W. Bush. But how general is the tendency? Would we find the same pattern replicated at a more local scale of analysis, such as that of Santa Clara County, California?

These are just a few of the questions we might entertain in this discussion forum; anything that links geography with voting behavior is fair game. I look forward to your comments.

Many thanks,

Martin W. Lewis

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Starting Wednesday, October 15, you can follow The Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections in real time. To learn more about this timely Stanford University course, you can watch the introductory video below, or download it from iTunesU. And once the first lecture is posted, we invite you to join the discussion hosted by the professor, Martin Lewis. Stay tuned for more, and enjoy the course.

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Instructor

Martin Lewis
Lecturer in History
mwlewis@stanford.edu

Stanford Continuing Studies

482 Galvez Street
Stanford, CA 94305
continuingstudies@stanford.edu

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Martin Lewis
Senior Lecturer in History, Stanford University
mwlewis@stanford.edu

Martin Lewis received a PhD from UC Berkeley in geography. He is the author or co-author of four books, including The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (with Karen Wigen) and Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (with Lester Rowntree, Marie Price, and William Wyckoff). You can access his full bio here.

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Required Reading

1. Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections, by Yan Mieczkowski. 2001. Routledge.

2. Beyond Red State, Blue State: Electoral Gaps in the 21st-Century American Electorate, by Laura Olson and John Green. 2008. Prentice Hall.

Other Useful Works

1. Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, by Morris Fiorina, Samuel Abrams, and Jeremy Pope. 2005. Longman.

2. Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics, by James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht. 2004. University of Michigan Press.

3. Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. 2004. Oxford University Press.

4. Political Geography of the United States, by Fred M. Shelley, J. Clark Archer, Fiona M. Davidson, and Stanley D. Brunn. 1996. Guilford.

5. Political Behavior of the American Electorate, by William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale. 2006. CQ Press.

6. The Unfinished Election of 2000, edited by Jack Rakove. 2001. Basic Books.

7. The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It, by Stanley B. Greenberg. 2004 Thomas Dunne.

8. America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History, by Morton Keller. 2007. Oxford University Press.

9. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop. 2008. Houghton Mifflin.

10. Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do,
by Andrew Gelman. Princeton University Press, 2008

11. Historical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections 1788-2004, by J. Clark Archer et al.
Washington, D.C. : CQ Press, 2006.

Important Websites

1. Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
An invaluable source of information and maps. For a modest fee, one can join the site and get access to additional content.

2. Electoral Geography 2.0: Mapped Politics
A great source for international electoral geography.

3. Maps and Cartograms of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Elections Results
by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, University of Michigan. (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/). Small site, but great maps.

4. StateMaster
A good site for general maps and statistical information at the state level.

5. Social Explorer
Good demographic and religious maps of the U.S.

6. Census Scope
Good demographic maps of the U.S.

7. The Electoral Map: The Intersection of Politics and Geography
An informative blog that often contains interesting maps.

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This is a five week course. You can find a new video each Wednesday, with the first appearing on Wednesday, October 15th and the last appearing on Wednesday, November 12th. Videos will be made available on iTunes and YouTube.

The course will unfold as follows:

Week 1 - October 15.
The basic principles of political geography; the “red and blue” map of the United States; different ways of mapping U.S. presidential elections; differences in voting behavior between national elections and state and local elections; electoral geography in selected foreign countries.

Week 2 - October 22.
U.S. Presidential elections from 1789 to 1916.

Week 3 - October 29.
U.S. Presidential elections from 1920 to 1996.

Week 4 - November 5.
U.S. Presidential elections in 2000 and 2004.

Week 5 - November 12.
The 2008 election.

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The geography of American presidential elections has recently emerged as a topic of considerable interest and profound controversy. After the 2000 general election, many observers partitioned this country into a “Red America” of resolutely Republican-voting states and a “Blue America” of strongly Democratic-voting states. Prominent critics of the model, however, contend that the electorate is not nearly as polarized as the two major parties are, and that centrist political sentiments prevail across most parts of the country. Others think that Americans are indeed split into two increasingly antagonistic camps, but argue that the geographical patterns of this division seldom follow state lines, as most states are themselves split between “blue” and “red” regions. Some evidence suggests that population density is the critical variable, with the more densely populated parts of the country voting for the Democratic Party, and the less densely settled areas supporting the Republicans. But no matter how one frames the issue, exceptions can be found.

Complex configurations of electoral geography in the United States are not new. Different areas of particular states have often voted in distinctive manners, and the distinctions among urban, suburban, and rural voting behavior are of long standing. But over time, the voting patterns have repeatedly changed. During some periods of American history the opposing parties have enjoyed commanding leads in particular regions of the country, whereas at other times national elections have been competitive in most states. Major geographical realignments of party support have also occurred. In fact, the map of the 1996 Presidential election is almost the inverse of that of 2000; many of the counties of California that were once the most reliably Republican-voting are now among the strongest supporters of the Democratic Party. Whether such shifts in partisan allegiance indicate changes in underlying ideology, however, is a different matter altogether, as the major parties themselves have switched positions on a number of important issues.

This map-intensive course explores the geography of U.S. presidential elections in detail, examining voting patterns down to the level of individual counties and cities. We will begin with a survey of global electoral geography before turning to the geo-history of voting in the United States. The 2000 and 2004 general elections will be mapped and analyzed in particular detail. The final session (held after the November 4 election) will examine the geographical patterns revealed by the 2008 election.

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