Actually, I examined the state by state results pretty carefully last night. I was impressed by how well Nader did in states where one doesn't expect many progressives. Look at the numbers for Montana and Nebraska for instance.
I sez:
On a related note, I'm sure somebody out there has noticed that ever since Jim Crow was busted up in the U.S. South, in presidential elections the Dems do well in New England, the mid-Atlantic, upper Midwest, and West Coast, and the Repubs everywhere else -- the geographical polar opposite of 100 years ago, when the Repubs were the party of railroad and steel magnates and the Dems were the party of petty bourgeois farmers squeezed by the banks and the merchants. Looking at the voting counts state-by-state and county-by-county, I am astonished by the margins that Bush wracked up in the rural (and slightly less so the urban) counties of the Rocky Mountains and (especially) Great Plains states. States like North and South Dakota and Nebraska did not use to be gimmes in the Republican column. And in California the divide between the Bay Area and the Southland (sharp), the coast and the interior (sharper), and the urban and the rural (even sharper yet, except where there are large numbers of citizen farmworkers registered to vote) articulate this national divide on the scale of a single state. Even though the Repubs are nominally the party of big capital slightly moreso than the Dems, thanks to federalism and the electoral college the Repubs can be competitive in and win presidential elections by stomping the Dems in the "heartlands" and peeling off their fair share of affluent whites in the "nowhere U.S.A." cookie-cutter suburbs and exurbs everywhere.
The curious thing which ChuckO points out is that Nader fared surprisingly well in some Rocky Mountain states (Montana, Utah) which have become more solidly or overwhelmingly Republican in the last 30 years. The same goes for a few rural counties in California -- and not just the bed-and-breakfast and patchouli hotbeds of Mendocino and Humboldt, by the way. This, I think, is partially traceable to a free-floating populism suspicious of large and remote bureaucratic institutions, be it ConAgra, the BLM, the UN, or the WTO -- w/the various and sundry nativist and reactionary trappings that go with it. But also I think revulsion with Gore in these parts comes from a reaction to the peculiar brand of urban upper-middle class environmentalism of which Gore is emblematic -- the mostly symbolic but sometimes real cutbacks in fed gov't giveaways and subsidies to water- and land-hogging farmers, ranchers, loggers, miners, etc. The flip side of Wise Use and the militias and the Sagebrush Rebellion Part II is the conversion of the countryside and wildnerness into well-preserved havens for urban "environmentalists" with their GPS-outfitted SUV's and Patagonia climbing and backpacking gear. Primary sector activity in the outback is not a profitable endeavor in a capitalist economy w/out the fed subsidies and giveaways that these firms and their dependents became accustomed to (and at the same time paradoxically resented).
I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this, except to note that despite the bland convergence of the two principal bourgeois parties to the center-right (fiscal austerity, free trade, deregulation, etc.), in terms of the social class and sectional character of their constituentcies, the lines of demarcation have rarely been sharper. But I think you need an ecological Marxist social geography to make sense of it ...
John Gulick