Maps intrigue me. Soon after the presidential election, a map popped up on some blogsite, which showed a fascinating correlation between the counties with the highest cotton production in 1860, and those voting for Obama in the presidential election.If you took the 1860 map and overlaid it with the 2008 one, the picture was clear: the counties of the American South producing most cotton in 1860 were strongly pro-Obama in 2008. The correlation obviously points to the large African-American population in those counties of the South that were the core of the antebellum cotton kingdom, which had everything to do with the slave system, with the enrichment of a white minority by the forced labor of many slaves.
In 2008, in one region of the country (the South), where many leaned strongly to McCain, counties with a strong African-American presence went for Obama. In fact, another correlation the same map also teased out is this: the counties of the American South that were largely not devoted to cotton production in 1860 (and which never had a large slave population, because they are in areas with less productive soil) were more likely to vote for McCain in 2008. The whiter the county in the South, the more Republican; the blacker the county in the South, the more Democratic.
We like to think we have lived beyond a time in which race matters. We clearly haven't. We continue to have much work to do, as a culture, around matters of race.
Another correlation hit me yesterday when I ran across a national county-by-county map showing where Baptists are concentrated across the nation. The map shows a red swathe across the South, with a heavy band of Baptist-majority counties running through Georgia and Alabama into Arkansas, north Louisiana, east Texas, and Oklahoma.
I haven't seen any analysis of a correlation between counties with a majority of Baptist voters and McCain supporters in the last election. But a bell definitely went off in my mind when I saw that map of counties with large numbers of Baptists yesterday. I feel pretty sure that if anyone took it and overlaid it with a map of Republican-voting counties in the last presidential election, there'd be a strong correlation: red Baptist counties, red Republican counties.
All of which is a preface to a quick remark about the "State of the States" map that Gallup released recently, showing which states are now solidly red, which are solidly blue, and which fall somewhere in the middle (www.gallup.com/poll/114016/State-States-Political-Party-Affiliation.aspx). The map shows the Republican presence dwindling to a minority of states, chief among them now the Mormon strongholds of Utah and Idaho, along with Wyoming.
States regarded as "competitive" (that is, states that were recently strongly Republican but where there now seems to be a trend to Democratic voters, resulting in a split demographic) include most of the states of the old South, Texas, Arizona, Kansas, and a tier of upper-Midwestern and Western states including the two Dakotas and Montana.
As I noted some time ago in a posting asking who reads and who doesn't read Bilgrimage, this blog's strongest readership is in the blue states of either coast (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/who-reads-who-doesnt.html). On the other hand, my site counter showed no hits from December 10 to January 10 from the following states: Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, Vermont, Maine.
As of Jan. 29, I was showing no readers in North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Idaho, and Montana.* And those "competitive" states, with a continued strong Republican presence? They show up on my stats counter as the states with the least readers in the nation.
Interesting correlations: Bilgrimage seems to appeal to blue-state readers far more than to red-state ones, though I'm writing from a state that went very red in the last election. And a state whose clownish legislature has just blocked a resolution to congratulate President Obama on his election (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2009/01/shoutout_to_arkansas_house.aspx#comments). The ostensible reason for the refusal to pass this resolution? It includes language that speaks of our nation as one founded by slave owners.
We have a looong way to go to overcome racism in this nation. Not to mention stupidity, which I often see full-face in my state's elected representatives. As a cousin of mine once wrote to the statewide paper when the legislature had finished its business for that year: "The circus is ended. The clowns have gone home."
And little has changed since that letter got published in the mid-1970s.
So lest the good folks of Wyoming, a state I've never even visited, should think I was picking on that state in my posting yesterday about small-town America and its bizarre fixation with the notion that someone, somewhere, is trying to force "the homosexual lifestyle" down its throat: I certainly didn't mean to single Wyoming out. I have enough stupid in my own back yard to deal with on a daily basis, believe me.
* But I do know of at least one faithful reader in Montana. So perhaps some of these no-read states are represented in the mysterious "Not Set" category that enumerates readers whose state doesn't come through on the counter. There were three such hits this month.
