The New York Times is running a really interesting election metric map. The most interesting variable is the first: population density.
Interactive Map: Electoral Explorer
The denser the population, the more Democrat.
The more spread out, the more Republican.
The inflection point seems to be about 3 per acre.
That really maps into the dialect in the book "Grand New Party" and some of my thinking on the subject.
If you add the national race together with the Governor's race here in Washington and Prop 1, you can make a really good case that this election was a war between the rural areas and the urban areas with the exurbs as a battleground.
To us Republicans, this election was a power grab by the planners and urbans who needed a larger tax base. A light rail project can be seen not as a transportation solution, but as a way of binding the city into an ever larger political entity, one that provides more tax monies to the bureaucrats.
The alternatives are things like small independent businesses and low density housing that doesn't bring with it all the high cost needs like crime, mass transit and so on.
In fact, I fictionalized these ideas in a story I wrote for the Internet game, SuperStruct:
Agraria versus the United Urbs of America
Posted by jabailo at November 14, 2008 06:32 PM | Email This