Here is a snapshot of a similar map online. Click on it to see the full-sized interactive map, from which you then can bring up other versions of the winners-by-county map as well:
In the maps, counties that went overwhelmingly for one candidate or the other are shown with a three-dimensional elevation the height of which is proportional to the candidate's margin of victory, in number of votes, in that county.
In addition, on both maps in the print edition the counties that switched their favored party in 2008 compared with 2004 are shown in gold. (In the online map, the flipped counties are not identified as such.) Surprisingly few counties switched: McCain flipped just 50 counties that had supported Kerry in '04, largely in a loose chain extending from Appalachia across the Upper Southland into Texas; Obama flipped some 286 counties that had gone for Bush in '04, mostly in the Upper Midwest, in African American-rich parts of the South, and here and there in the vast American West.
The huge majority of America's counties voted for McCain in '08, just as they had voted for Bush in '04, and the McCain 2008 map is about as close to being solid red as was the Bush map in '04.
Only a minority of the nation's counties voted majority-Obama in '08. His blue counties (the ones which Kerry also won in 2004) are heavily clustered in New England and the Northeast; in the upper Midwest, in economically distressed states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa; across the old Confederacy in areas in which I assume African-American voters predominate; in the heavily black Mississippi Delta in particular; in the Southwest, where many Hispanic and Native American voters cluster; and along the Pacific Coast in California, Oregon, and Washington State, where ethnically diverse populations include many Asians, Latinos, and blacks.
On the blue-county Obama map, however, there are several prepossessingly tall, or at least medium-sized, voter-margin spikes in large urban areas such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, and the major cities of Florida and along the East Coast. By contrast, the "tallest" jurisdictions McCain could claim victory this year in are relatively puny in elevation, reflecting smaller numerical margins of victory: Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and several other mid-size cities cast more votes for McCain than Obama.
My interpretation: where the bulk of the populace is white, without a college education, not rich but typically not poor, and largely middle-aged or older, McCain won. That demographic is a shrinking one today, though, and where it is not predominant, Obama won.
How solid the red is on the McCain map is worrisome to yours truly, oldstyleliberal, an ardent Obama supporter. Ditto, how sparse and discontiguous the blue of the Obama map is. We heard a lot of talk during the campaign about healing the political divide that has beset us since the 1960s. The two maps seem to show that that did not happen. The country segments just as sharply into blue and red swatches today as it did four years ago.
True, the fact that most of McCain's red counties are represented at "base elevation" on the map, not raised to show large voter margins, is encouraging; there may well have been sizable minorities of Obama voters in the red jurisdictions. Still, many of the McCain counties are probably so low in population that if McCain got every vote in them, they'd still look flat on the map. Small-town/rural America is by definition sparsely inhabited. (I'd like to see the same maps with elevations indicating percentage-of-vote margins rather than number-of-vote margins.)
Yet I'd have to say that, historically, small-town/rural America accounts for an outsized share of our uniquely American cultural experience — a share whose importance the vast, nearly solid red of McCain's America depicts quite accurately. Clearly, the folks that define a huge proportion of our land's cultural "footprint," once in the majority but a shrinking portion of our total population today, looked at Obama and found him wanting.
Obama's mixed-race background and African-American looks clearly didn't help him in the American Heartland, which is what I'll call the vast composite of red counties on the McCain map — even when they are far from the geographic middle of the U.S.A. Ditto, the president-elect's odd name for an American, and his seemingly rootless/possibly elitist cultural identity. (It boggled my mind how many people refused to believe that Obama wasn't a Christian/was secretly a Muslim, and that he was hiding a pro-terrorist agenda.)
The pundits are saying Obama's election augurs a "post-racial" America. I'd like to believe they're right, but the sheer geographic hugeness of McCain's red Heartland says they're being premature.
The aging, white, non-college-educated population was the one McCain picked running mate Sarah Palin to garner votes from. Palin's candidacy was also aimed at women who had supported Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primaries, and at the Republican "base" of confirmed conservatives, cultural and otherwise. (These three groups, of course, overlapped.) One reason the Palin strategy didn't work is that the Alaska governor turned out to carry a lot of baggage: her record in Alaska, her unguarded, untutored statements to the press, and so on. Obama supporters dug up a lot of ammunition and they didn't hesitate to fire it at her — endlessly, it seemed to oldstyleliberal — and many of the bullets struck home.
Still and all, I imagine that Palin firmed up a large number of votes for McCain in his red-county Heartland. They just weren't enough to propel him to electoral-college victory, for sheerly numerical, demographic reasons. With the possible exception of some Clinton supporters who may have peeled away from Palin when they twigged to her political feet of clay, I believe Palin's candidacy did its intended job very nicely.
But McCain's candidacy was cursed by the onset of the financial crisis. Had he somehow been able to sidestep that particular negative, I think he might have managed to keep Obama from flipping fully nine states (including North Carolina, if it remains in the Obama column) that went for Bush in '04. Yet I believe Obama would have eked out his victory anyway in the electoral college — though not necessarily in the popular vote.
A big part of the reason is demographics. Where there are lots of non-whites, where the white majority is highly educated, where voters skew young — in parts of the country outside the red-county McCain Heartland, that is — there were oodles of voters that didn't reliably vote old-style "values." For the highly "pragmatic" voters of these blue counties, the Washington Post points out, today's "family values" center around mainly education and health care, not abortion and gay rights.
Given the opportunity to single out conservative cultural issues one by one, though, a 2008 blue state such as California will (as we just saw) narrowly support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Because any presidential candidate's bag of promises is by definition a mixed, highly complex bag, a Barack Obama will win handily in California, even when some of his positions in and of themselves seem way too liberal to gain majority support in the state.
At a point in the not-too-distant future — or so we must all hope — "pragmatic" issues such as fears about the economy will evaporate as the economy gets more robust again. What then? Will Obama be able to cruise to victory in 2012, even if he does a fine job in his first term, or will too many of the 286 counties he flipped this year desert him as former Bush voters revert to their old-style cultural/values concerns?
I'm hoping, naturally, for a liberal efflorescence to take hold between now and 2012. If that happens, enough now-skeptical Americans would be swept up in an affirmative, unabashedly liberal, pro-big government mood to offset any deserters and return Obama to the Oval Office for a second term. But how can that happen?
Obama needs to change America's basic mindset in much the same way as JFK began to do in the early 1960s, before he was assassinated in '63. The best way for Obama to "do a JFK" is to do pretty much what JFK did, starting in his 1960 campaign: convince Americans that an agenda of progressive change is our best bulwark against future adversity.
Obama has indicated he'll call for an "Apollo program" to switch us to alternative, renewable forms of energy over a ten-year period ... exactly as Kennedy called for putting an American on the moon by the end of his own presidential decade.
We had to beat the Soviets into space, Kennedy said, to show the world we were still a great country. Meanwhile, we had to back the symbolism of his space initiative by solving our very real problems at home: poverty, educational shortfalls, medical care that "the aged" couldn't afford, racial inequality. Those were issues of grit and substance. But Kennedy's space program was more than just symbolic; it jumpstarted a high-tech economy we have all benefited from ever since.
Obama understands that an "Apollo program" for energy will likewise have all sorts of benefits. Admittedly, it will take a huge monetary investment to go green. That money will have to come first from Uncle Sam, just as the costs of the space program were borne by taxpayers. But exactly as the space program did, America's "green revolution," once it gets under way, will pay large dividends. It will stimulate economic growth and foster job creation. It will break our dependence on foreign oil, and it will combat global warming. Overall, it will create a new sense of pride in our country ... and that can translate into affirmative support for a 21st-century liberal agenda, à la Barack Obama.
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