There's a lot of dross in the political journalism that proliferates quadrennially but, for those who are interested, there are exceptions as well. Ron Brownstein, of The Atlantic, is one. His latest piece includes the following graf:
Democrats now rely on an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and socially liberal college-educated and single whites (especially women). Republicans thrive among older, non-college educated and religiously devout whites, especially outside of major cities. In 2012, President Obama carried less than one-fourth of America’s counties; he won fewer counties than any presidential winner since at least 1920. But because Obama so dominated the nation’s population centers, he triumphed by 5 million votes.
The above map, which depicts the outcome of the 2012 presidential election not by county but by congressional district, amplifies Brownstein's point. Districts carried by Romney are different shades of red, depending upon his margin over Obama. The Obama districts are shades of blue. Looks like a Romney landslide, doesn't it? Check out the key states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. They're practically all red, and Obama carried each one. This can happen because congressional districts all have a population of around 700,000. Wyoming is a uniform hue, since the whole state is one congressional district. Meanwhile, a big city is just a speck. You can see, if barely, that those four states I called out are dark blue in and around Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
It's fun to speculate about the why of this very pronounced phenomenon. There must be, to some degree, a kind of self-sifting that occurs. Democrats do well with nurses and educators, while Republicans do well with business executives and military officers--because, I think, the traits that attract people to these different lines of work are cousins of the traits that go into forming political opinions that align with one side or the other. Similarly, there is something about people who choose to live in a big city that causes them to choose the Democrats, too. Vice-versa for Republicans.
Olive Garden is Republican; bistros with flaming waiters who while detailing the menu ask whether you eat red meat--that's not just my side of the restaurant divide, it's my side of the political one.
There's an aspect of this whole subject that I wish Democrats would talk about more. The country as a whole is considerably more Democratic than the elected "representation" in Washington. If you take a randomly selected American and a randomly selected member of the U.S. Congress, it's more likely that the citizen will prefer the Democrats and the member of Congress will be a Republican than the other way around. There's two factors that go into this. The first is the fact that the composition of the Senate is not based on population. Each state, no matter its population, has two senators. This means that big states with big cities and large populations, which tend to be the blue ones, are underrepresented in the Senate. When the senators of the largest state (California) and of the smallest (Wyoming) have voted on some issue, the tally is usually 2-2. But if you put the question, whatever it is, to the people of the two states, the outcome in all likelihood wouldn't be close at all.
The other factor leading to outsized Republican "pull" has to do with the way we Democrats congregate in population centers, thereby giving a relatively few congressional districts a superfluity of Democratic voters. There are a lot of ways to demonstrate this tendency but one of the best is to return again to the result of the last presidential election, congressional district by congressional district. If all the districts won by Romney had a Republican representative, and all the ones carried by Obama had a Democratic one, then Republicans would have a 226 to 209 majority in the House of Representatives. The Speaker of the House would be a Republican, the chairs of the committees would be Republicans, and the legislative agenda would be set by Republicans. But the Democrat won the election by about 5 million votes.
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