Beyond red and blue (again)

Page 3 of 3 -- Despite these shifts, the "must-win" regions for each party will probably be the same in 2008 as they were in 2004 -- and 2000. For example, it's hard to imagine the Democrats winning without taking back the Big River region -- that is, holding on to enough rural and small-town votes to keep Minnesota and Wisconsin, win back Iowa, and at least make the Republicans fight for Arkansas and Missouri.As for the Republicans, the question may be whether they can go any farther by revving up their conservative, mostly rural base in Appalachia and the Farm Belt (which Bush won with 59 percent). It's possible that they'll need to look toward more populous counties with culturally conservative Catholic and blue-collar workers -- those old "Reagan Democrats."

ADVERTISEMENT

This year in Pennsylvania, Bush did flip two counties in the corridor between Pittsburgh and Erie; if the GOP is maxed out in Appalachia, those are the kinds of places that could switch the state's electoral votes. And in Michigan, Bush did well in the most rural parts of the Farm Belt, but he would have had to bulk up his showings in the region's urban counties to carry the state.The Republicans must also keep an eye on the Southwest. In winning the Sagebrush region by a bigger margin (60.6 percent) than the Democrats won the more heavily Hispanic and urban El Norte (54.9 percent), the GOP helped to snatch New Mexico and hold onto Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. But the population is growing so rapidly in those states that the Republicans can't be sure of that equation holding for four more years.

The 10 Regions approach also puts the perplexing question of what the Democratic Party needs to do about the South in a different light. Right now, common wisdom is that the party must reduce the Republican margin in Appalachia by somehow neutralizing the "guns, God, and gays" issues that have doomed Democrats in rural areas. But it could be just as important to build on the party's foundation in Southern Lowlands, which is more urban, better-educated, and more heavily minority than the other Southern regions (indeed, Southern Lowlands has the highest percentage of blacks in the population, nearly 28 percent, of any of our 10 regions).

This choice isn't obvious on the red-and-blue map, which simply screams "Look South" or "Go West" to the Democratic party. But it would be foolish to assume there's only one way to court the South -- just as it would be short-sighted for the Republicans to believe that voters on the West Coast and in the Maine-to-Minnesota corner of America move in lockstep. If the parties want to understand the American electorate in 2008, they're going to have to go beyond red and blue.

Robert David Sullivan is an associate editor of CommonWealth, a quarterly journal published by MassINC, a Boston-based nonpartisan think tank. More on the 10 Regions of US Politics can be found at www.massinc.org.