Center Right, Center Left

WHAT!

You mean to tell me that all the media slicing/dicing demographics (see: religious right, 2000/2004) is really just a bunch of nonsense?

Tell me it ain't so......

How wonderful to see that band of blue spreading through the deep South. Cities everywhere seem quite blue.

The NY Times has an interactive map that among other things, shows the "voting shifts" from previous elections to 2008. In the "voting shifts" view each county is shaded blue if it became more Democratic and red if it became more Republican compared to previous elections. In other words it shows the change between the two maps that Kevin placed side by side. Very revealing:

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

How is saying that the country didn't shift, but their opinion of the party in power went way down. If the Dems take this election as a validation for all of their policies, 2010 is going to be 1994 (or 2006 with the parties flipped). Implement liberal policies, but tread softly. The Republicans didn't and look where it got them in a scant 4 years.

FWIW, I thought the mandate talk in 2004 was bullshit too.

The national maps up above look to me as though they tend to have big city Democrats opposed to small town rural Republicans. In the West a number of the red areas include places that are losing population as people move closer to large cities.

I looked at the Texas county-by-county map this morning, and the Democrats took every major city except Fort Worth. The Republicans took all the rural areas and small towns except in South Texas. I'd call any place in Texas rural if the people living there are more concerned with county government than city government.

That makes right-wing rural in culture and left-wing urban. To severely oversimplify, that indicates people whose life is dependent on the actions of others who they don't know personally as is true for every city dweller tend to be more communitarian than those who live and work in farms and small family businesses. City dwellers are more dependent on regulating the people around them than are people in low population density areas. (Government regulations such as those for food service, fire control, traffic control, building regulations, etc are all primarily an urban requirement.) City dwellers also are a great deal more tolerant of diversity.

I would speculate that in the low population density areas people have to concern themselves with their reputation a lot more since people tend to know each other. Someone from such a rural society would logically feel impinged upon by government regulations they don't see as needed.

Of course, Looking at this nationally also depends on the new, post-Nixon-Southern-Strategy definitions of Republican and Democrat. The conservative Democrats who ran Texas in the 50's and 60's are quite comfortable as Republicans today. We now have more national parties rather than the alliances of state parties that were common until the 50's and 60's. That makes what each stands for more uniform.

I am, of course, ignoring suburbs.

This map would be a lot more useful if it were scaled by population - county-by-county is a pretty good proxy but not as good as those crazy cartograms that scale by population.

Could you do a version in which the counties are all squished so their size corresponds to their population?

The umich link above is just what you want.

On a personal note, the first time I encountered cartograms of one sort or another was in Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain.

RIP Michael, ya may have been a global warming denier, but you (often**) gave me some damn fine books and movies.

** (often, but except for when they stank, no offense Michael.)

Isn't saying that 90% of Dems voted for Obama rather meaningless if you don't look at how the actual number of registered Dems changed?

Bingo. I'll wager there's also been a certain actuarial decline in the GOP from four years ago.