[I wonder if there would be a way to map this in a way that would be striking and clear. Perhaps by county?]
Los Angeles Times
November 7, 2004
COMMENTARY
Hicks Nixed Slicks' Pick
By Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at PrincetonUniversity.
"It's the secular coasts versus the religious heartland," CNN's Tucker
Carlson says of this year's election results. That sums up the
conventional wisdom that right-wing Republicans would prefer that you
believe and that too many of the rest of us do believe. The effete
liberal coasts against the Real America. Situational morality against
real morality. Relativism against Standards. Metrosexuals against the
God-fearing.
Wrong.
The real electoral division isn't between the coasts and the
heartland. It's between cities all over the United States and the rest
of the country.
In every state in the Union, red states included, Sen. John F. Kerry
performed disproportionately well in urban areas. Kerry actually
carried, sometimes convincingly, cities in some of the deepest-red red
states that are about as far from coastal secularism as you can
imagine.
Missouri, for example, broke 54% to 46% for Bush -- except the city of
St. Louis, which voted overwhelmingly for Kerry.
Nobody ever really took seriously Kerry's chances of carrying Texas.
But in El Paso, he won 56% of the vote. What is so "secular," so
bicoastal, so effete about El Paso?
Alabama is supposed to be the buckle of the pro-GOP Bible Belt. But
don't say that too loudly in Montgomery County, eponymous home to the
state capital, which came in with a Kerry majority, as did Dallas
County, home to the city of Selma, which voted for Kerry by a 60% to
40% margin.
From Richmond, Va., to Jackson, Miss., from Salt Lake City, Utah, to
Columbia, S.C., the Democratic ticket either won outright or ran well
ahead of statewide totals.
Now let us reverse the terms. New York is a huge blue state. On
Tuesday, though, it was a sea of red, except for some tiny blue dots
around New York City, Albany, bits of Long Island and a few other
places. California, the quintessence of Carlson's secular coast, was
also pretty solidly red, except for L.A., San Francisco and San Diego.
The California pattern may seem, at first glance, to suit the
stereotype. Everybody knows about "San Francisco Democrats" and the
fleshpots of L.A. But Memphis, Tenn.? Selma, Ala.?
The reasons for the city-country divide are obvious. Cities are home,
disproportionately, to wage earners, civil service employees, racial
minorities and immigrants -- and those people are overwhelmingly
Democrats. The cities are where those who are still hoping to cash in
on the American dream pray and work -- except for those domestic
servants who commute to the suburbs to clean the houses of those who
have already cashed in on the American dream.
The cities are also, of course, the homes to all of those artsy
intellectuals, entertainment industry elitists and limousine liberals
whom the GOP and its backers like to demonize. But these liberal elite
enclaves are tiny even within the cities where they are located. The
minority and immigrant vote in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Harlem
dwarfs the numbers on Manhattan's Upper West Side and Greenwich
Village. The same holds true, to say the least, of the secular liberal
elite's grip on Montgomery, Ala.
The urban-rural split has been a perennial feature our political
history. In 1896, the last time the national election map closely
resembled that of today -- with the Northeast and the West Coast
seeming to go one way, and most of the rest of the country another --
the Democrats were the party of the countryside and the Republicans
the party of the city. Unlike today, the clash was explicit, pitting
the agrarian values of populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan
against the pro-business industrialism of Republican, William
McKinley.
"Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will
spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass
will grow in the streets of every city in the country," Bryan
proclaimed in the famous speech that gained him the nomination.
In 2004, there is a harder and even more inflammatory aspect to the
split, usually mentioned only in code: divisions of race. Although
most black Americans live in the South, and in non-metropolitan
regions, the fact remains that our cities, in every area of the
country, are as a rule more heavily African American than they were in
Bryan's and McKinley's time. Not surprisingly, because blacks vote
overwhelmingly Democratic, many of the bluest cities in the red states
are those with the largest black voting presence. Richmond (58.1%),
Memphis (61.4%) and Jackson (71.1%) rank among the top 10 cities with
large and concentrated black populations.
By perpetuating the easy impression of a nation divided into coastal
liberals and heartland conservatives, reporters and commentators are
misleading themselves and their audiences about the actual political
state of the Union. Without realizing it, they are also advancing the
picture of the nation advanced by the GOP culture warriors, feeding
the despair and paranoia of coastal liberals and writing off millions
of Americans in every part of the country.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times