Map 3
You might well wonder, with these mirror-image results, how Obama wound up with a decisive victory. Map 3, above, looks like just a few counties strewn all over the place, while Map 2 looks like the vast majority of the nation.
Well, that’s the funny thing. The counties on Map 2 are actually only 30% of the electorate, and a similar share of the population. Those few-and-far between counties on Map 3 are 70%.
This isn’t Abraham Lincoln’s America any more. The population today is very urbanized and concentrated. That doesn’t mean we’re all crammed into one corner of the country. We now have big cities all over the place, not just in the north-central/northeastern corridor the way it used to be. The 70% includes urbanized counties in all but four states (Alaska, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, all won by McCain, by the way). It’s also true that many counties within the 70% are suburbs rather than “inner cities.” Mind you, we’re talking the inner suburbs—densely populated areas that tend to cluster closely around large cities, not far-flung exurbs. Other 70-percenter counties contain smaller but significant “inner cities.” Even in Kansas, a state many think of as the essence of rural America, the five Map 3 counties (all in the Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita areas) contain 54% of the electorate! Out of such components—along with more obvious ones, like the Northeastern Megapolis—is made up the 70%.
This 70% of the population, dense but scattered all over the country, is the real America. The thinly populated 30%, where McCain won, is the not-real, not-truly American America—you know, the people who just have to be different, who can’t or won’t fit in with ordinary folks. We’re talking rednecks and yahoos, hicks and evangelicals—people who, instead of playing basketball like regular people, bowl and watch NASCAR. These are people with such an itch to do their own thing, they eat at Applebee’s instead of an arugula-dominated salad bar, drive SUV’s instead of hybrids, and have unwholesome small-town values instead of urban sophistication.
Okay, before I offend anyone, let me make this clear. I don’t really believe any of what I just said. I take it for granted that every part of this country is the real America, and I certainly don’t believe in the silly stereotypes I’ve just enumerated. I’m just making a satirical point here.
We’ve been told in innumerable ways that the big-city, liberal parts of the country aren’t the real America. This has been going on, not just for the last few years, but for almost three decades. It didn’t take poor, nutty Michelle Bachmann to do this. It took the corporate media from the Reagan era, which were infatuated with the idea that Reagan, most of whose aggressively right-wing policies actually had little popular support, was the leader of a grass-roots swell to the right that was overwhelming the supposedly shrinking urban holdouts that were all the poor Democrats had left. Back then, even most liberals seemed to buy into this garbage. Worse yet, many of them perpetuated it, spewing forth patronizing comments about how “the sad truth is, people in the real America aren’t so enlightened” and such. Happily, in the last few years, most liberals seem to have woken up from this bad dream of their own creation.
My point is that once you start engaging in that ultimately fascistic kind of reasoning, treating one part of America as somehow realer or truer or more American than another, the shoe can just as easily fit the other foot. The 2008 election shows the more rural, small town, and exurban 30% of the country out of synch with the majority. It shows that majority manifesting itself in a thinly scattered 70%, consisting of the most urbanized parts of the population. This deserves to be highlighted.
Not that it’s as simple as 70-30. The 70% can be split down the middle, rendering America into three roughly equal pieces. Here’s 35% of the electorate, representing the middle-density communities:
Map 4
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