Bubbles of Voters! and other observations

I must say, this interactive electoral map from the NYTimes is incredibly fascinating. I've been playing with it for the past hour. The county bubbles are like little colonies and dragging the shifter, you can see the pulsating trends in voter behavior since the 1992 election of Bill Clinton. Checking out the "Voting Shifts" tab, you can see how Obama's election compared with elections in years past. Comparing it to 2004, you can see how Obama utterly outperformed Kerry in almost every single county in the nation except for Arizona (home field advantage) and a swath of land that stretches from coastal Louisiana through north Texas, Oklahoma and all of Arkansas, across Tennessee and up through the Appalachian region of Kentucky and West Virginia. These are the only counties where Obama did worse than Kerry, or conversely, where McCain did better than Bush. (Can you say the Confederacy's last stand?)

But as I was dragging over the county bubbles, it was clear that nearly every major city voted for Obama by a huge margin (resulting in big, blue bubbles). Out of curiosity, I decided to go through the 100 largest counties in America (by population) and see how if the pattern held up. You can find my excel calculation sheet here. The results -- 87 Obama, 11 McCain, 2 tied.

If you're a Republican, things look pretty grim for your country in the near future. The US population is projected to become more urban, more diverse (specifically, more hispanic), and more educated (specifically, more college-educated). Why would these people vote for the party of Joe the Plumber? Or the party of Tom DeLay?

If I were a Republican, I'd be quaking in my boots, knowing that not only will my cultural appeals seem ineffectively ethnocentric but that my policy objectives will be exposed as elitist and overly harsh to average Americans.

I think that there are two distinct types of Republicans in America -- cultural nationalists and intellectual conservatives.

Cultural nationalists are peaceful and homely people with a keen eye towards judgment of the wicked. They are unquestioning in their patriotism and their social conservatism. They ate up the rhetoric of the Cold War, the War on Drugs, the and the War on Terror. They faithfully defended marriage against gays, the sanctity of life against abortion, religious faith against secularism. Their fears are a powerful political force.

On the other hand, there are intellectual conservatives, students of history, who believe in the virtues of prudence, self-reliance and reason. They are the first to poke holes in "Big Ideas." In the face of good intentions, they are the first to ask, "How you gonna pay for it?" They believe in the entrepreneurial spirit of the individual, the fallibility of concerted collective action, and the beauty of order in the face of an incomprehensibly complex society. They champion a humble foreign policy and non-governmental remedies to social ills.

Now, the Republican party in practice represents nothing close to either of these two types of people. The sleaze and corruption of the Old Boys Network and the neoconservative worldview of the Military-Industrial-Political complex have been far more influencial in practice. And this much more ominous problem stretches across party. However, going forward, Republicans are going to have to come up with a plan to stay competitive with minorities, with urbanites, and with college-educated young people. This is the future of America, and Republicans are going to have to shift gears to catch up with it.