Demographics and political destiny
IF YOU spend enough time studying election returns, you can start to see politics as just another branch of science - like quantum physics, but without the humanity. Pundits who prefer to psychoanalyze voters are apt to depict campaigns as wild affairs full of plot twists, but the geography of American politics is surprisingly resistant to change, at least in the short term.
Thomas Frank can ask "What's the Matter with Kansas?" because it votes Republican, but he can't accuse that state's voters of being fickle or impulsive. Kansas has been one of the country's most Republican states for more than 90 years.
It's not just a matter of knowing history; demographic factors such as race and religion can be mercilessly accurate in predicting how a place will vote in a presidential election. Still, there are the occasional aberrations, as well as places where contradictory rules of demography collide, and they're what really make politics interesting. For example, it's a good rule of thumb that the more urban a place is, the more liberal it is. Manhattan votes Democratic, and Mayberry votes Republican. Except that the most rural state in America - not measured by population density but by the more useful metric of what percentage of the population actually lives in small towns - is Vermont, which is solidly Democratic. And Utah, which is actually more urban, if also more religious, than New York state (there are lots of acres but very few people outside the Salt Lake City area) is the nation's most Republican state.
Super-educated counties have become reliably Democratic except for Los Alamos, New Mexico, which went for George W. Bush in 2004. Places with a lot of college graduates also preferred Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries - except for a diagonal line of them stretching from Manhattan to suburban Boston and southern New Hampshire.
Race is a very reliable indicator of voting patterns. Bush won 86 of the 100 counties with the highest percentage of non-Hispanic white residents the last time around. But John Kerry won 99-percent-white Carter County, Kentucky, part of the coal-mining region in the eastern part of the state and just a few miles from some of the most Republican counties in America. Apparently, demographics haven't completely erased partisan patterns going back to the Civil War.
Among counties with more than 100,000 people, the whitest place carried by Kerry was York County, Maine. Is it a coincidence that the Bush family's Kennebunk compound is there?
Looking up the percentage of a county's residents who are married is another way to make safe bets. In 2004, Bush won the 111 counties with the highest marriage rates, mostly in rural areas west of the Mississippi. But the streak was broken at number 112 by tiny, agrarian Steele County, North Dakota (68 percent of the population over 15 is married; Kerry won 51 percent). Maybe the idea that Obama can win North Dakota isn't so outrageous.
Meanwhile, Kerry won 80 of the 100 counties with the lowest marriage rates, mostly with major cities or academic communities and including two in Massachusetts (college-heavy Hampshire County and Boston's Suffolk County). The big exception to the rule was Brazos County, home of Texas A&M University, which proves that not all college towns think alike. (And if the Democrats can't win a college area, it's no wonder they can't ever carry the entire state of Texas.)
And in this year's primaries and caucuses, Obama carried 90 of the 100 counties with the lowest marriage rates including, again, Hampshire and Suffolk counties. The least-married counties to go for Clinton were Manhattan and the Bronx (both in her home state), followed by Ohio University's Athens County. It seems that just about all of Appalachia, including its most scholarly and least matrimonial areas, was immune to Obama's charm.
The exceptions also prove there is no single factor that can predict how every city and county will vote. And as someone who spends a lot of time compulsively trying to find the logic in voting returns, these aberrations are reassuring. What fun would election night be without them?
Robert David Sullivan is the managing editor of CommonWealth magazine and primary writer for the blog Beyond Red and Blue. 