Changing the polarized electoral landscape
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SHORTLY AFTER the 1972 election, film critic Pauline Kael was widely ridiculed for saying, "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him."
How could anyone be so insulated from the mainstream? Nixon had trounced George McGovern in most of the country. He even won comfortably in the New York borough of Queens, across the river from Kael's liberal cocoon of Manhattan. It's hard to imagine that many Americans were surprised by Nixon's reelection.
Well, there may have been a lot of Pauline Kaels after the last election. More than 36 million voters, or 30 percent of the electorate, lived in counties where President Bush lost to John F. Kerry, and lost big by at least 10 percentage points. (This compares with only 25 percent who lived in counties where Nixon beat John F. Kennedy by such a margin in 1960, though Nixon came closer to winning.) These voters were concentrated in New York, Boston, and most of the nation's biggest cities. And though Bush won the election by less than 3 percentage points, almost 50 million voters, or 41 percent of the electorate, lived in counties that he carried by double digits. These included exurban counties around such Sun Belt cities as Atlanta.
Though the contest between Bush and Kerry was tight at the macro level, only 29 percent of voters lived in counties where the victory margin was less than 10 points - where the winner wasn't evident within an hour of the polls closing. That's lower than the 32 percent who lived in competitive counties in 2000; the comparable figures were 46 percent in the Carter vs. Ford race of 1976 and 34 percent in the Kennedy vs. Nixon race.
It's easy to overstate the red state/blue state divide, but the geographic gap has clearly widened, partly because the Democratic and Republican labels have become almost synonymous with "urban" and "rural." For example, Kerry won San Francisco with 83 percent of the vote, the most lopsided margin in at least a century. Yes, Kerry was stronger there than FDR and LBJ were and a lot stronger than Jimmy Carter, who got only 56 percent of the Massachusetts vote while winning nationwide in 1976. At the other end of the spectrum, Bush won
This trend has taken many big states out of Electoral College strategizing, and, arguably, has isolated most Americans from flesh-and-blood campaigning. California and almost the entire Northeast have been written off as irredeemably Democratic; the Deep South and Great Plains states have been ignored because of their GOP-loving DNA.
Look at Illinois and Texas, two of the most evenly divided states in 1976. In Chicago's Cook County (once considered a hotbed of "Reagan Democrats"), Kerry got 70 percent of the vote, better than any candidate since 1920. The size of Kerry's margin in the county made the rest of the state irrelevant. In Texas, Kerry's 49 percent in Dallas County was better than any Democrat had done there since Johnson in 1964, but the state was still completely off the playing board, thanks in part to Bush winning 49 smaller counties, mostly to the west, by margins of more than 4 to 1. In all but five of those counties, Kerry's percentage was even lower than that of Walter Mondale, who got crushed statewide by Reagan in 1984.
The race between Barack Obama and John McCain, both of whom are popular among independent and moderate voters, may temper some of these extreme results, and Obama is making a point of trying to expand the number of states in play this fall. So we may return to a less geographically polarized result, much like the Carter vs. Ford race. If not, we could have tens of millions of Americans on Nov. 5 who are not simply disappointed by the result of the election, but genuinely perplexed. Expect lots of conspiracy theories about rigged votes to follow.
Robert David Sullivan, a guest columnist, is the managing editor of CommonWealth magazine.
