I used to work with a guy, a lawyer who loved pontificating, and I noticed that many of his pontifications included the sentence: The law abhors a vacuum! I thought of him today for the first time in awhile. I was doing some chores around the house and the specific thought I had was, "No, it's actually my cat who abhors a vacuum."
In other interesting (to me) news, some guy on Twitter posted the result of the 2016 presidential election by interstate highway, meaning who won, and by how much, the counties that the highway passes through, from one terminal point to the other. For example, Clinton carried I-5 by 26.7 percent—not too surprising, considering that I-5 parallels the Pacific coast, from Seattle to San Diego, and serves the metros of Portland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. Here's the rest of his list:
I-4: Clinton +6.4
I-10: Clinton +13.2
I-15: Clinton +4.3
I-20: Clinton +2.7
I-25: Clinton +7.5
I-29: Trump +7.0
I-30: Clinton +1.2
I-35: Clinton +4.9
I-40: Clinton +0.046 (2493 votes)
I-44: Trump +11.9
I-55: Clinton +26.0
I-64: Clinton: +3.7
I-65: Trump +9.4
I-75: Clinton +3.5
I-77: Clinton +6.1
I-80: Clinton +22.1
I-81: Trump +21.0
I-85: Clinton +11.4
I-90: Clinton +23.9
I-94: Clinton +25.3
I-95: Clinton +26.4
Is this surprising? Since the highways tend to connect major cities, Clinton's dominance is explained by the partisan divide being rural and small town versus metropolitan. If the result for a particular highway makes you curious about the route, there is a good Wikipedia article for all the interstate highways. From the article on I-81, Trump's best highway:
I-81 largely traces the paths created down the length of the Appalachian Mountains by migrating animals, American Indians, and early settlers. It also follows a major corridor for troop movements during the Civil War. . . . Being mostly rural, it is heavily used as a trucking corridor, and is often used as a bypass of the busier I-95 and I-85 to the east.
If there are no big cities, Trump wins, but that's rare on the interstate highway system. The result that surprised me related to the highway I feel I know best, having been up and down long stretches of it many times and living only a block off it in south Minneapolis: I-35, which runs from Duluth, Minnesota to Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border. It's in six states, one (Minnesota) carried narrowly by Clinton and the other five (Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas) won easily by Trump. Yet Clinton carried the counties of I-35 by 5 points. Could that be right? Yes, it can be, because she won Minneapolis's county by 63-28, St Paul's county by 65-26, Des Moines' county by 52-40, Kansas City's county by 56-38, Dallas's county by 61-35, Austin's county by 66-27, and San Antonio's county by 54-41. (You can check my work here.) There aren't enough people in between these huge metropolitan counties to catch Trump all the way up.
Don't let anyone tell you that the Democratic party only gets votes from "coastal elites." It's not coasts versus heartland. It's rural and small town versus metropolitan, including in the heartland—assuming "heartland" is not a kind of code for white and rural. I-35 bisects the country.
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