Stop Bashing Red States: The Invisible Blues

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

Some facts for blue-staters who want to secede from the union, or boycott red states in their entirety:

According to the latest USA Today numbers (updated 11/9), the total national vote for Kerry is 56,249,866.

Of those votes, almost half - 25,908,763 - were cast by voters in red states.

The lowest percentage of blue in a red state is Utah, with 26.4% voting for Kerry. The highest percentage is Iowa with 49.2%. The average percentage of blue voters among red states is 43.6%.

That's huge.

By contrast, 25,050,757 of Bush's 59,730,364 votes were cast in blue states. The average percentage of red voters among blue states is 42.9%.

The percentage of Bush voters in blue states is almost equal to the percentage of Kerry voters in red states. So just who is blue, and who is red?

That question is addressed on a site that caters to the GIS (Geographic Information Survey) community. Here, Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan take the well-known red/blue map and turn it into a cartogram that reflects voter preference by population.




The authors go further, using a map model developed by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University that breaks down the vote by county. Unlike the county maps generally seen in the media, Vanderbei's model adds purple to indicate counties that went for Bush by a slim margin. When this map is converted into a cartogram, here is the result.



As the authors point out, in this population-adjusted map, the red counties occupy only a rather small portion of the total area, most of the country appearing either in blue or in shades of purple.

So let's stop bashing red states. They are packed with invisible blue voters. Let's focus on reaching out to them, and let's concentrate on boycotting Republican donors, not "Republican states."

More from the GIS article:
http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/3823/


EDIT: Found and fixed an error in the percentage of Bush voters in blue states - sorry for the mistake.