When some Texas pols started running their mouths about seceding from the Union, I remember thinking it would be a crap deal for the residents of Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and El Paso. The talk about a national divorce seems to have spread, but, as the geographic division is not by region, as in the 1850s, but rather by metro areas versus outlying territory within states, I couldn't imagine what the family court settlement might look like. Now someone has produced the above map, as if to help my imagination along.
After verifying that I'd be in the blue country, I became absorbed in the map's details. First thing I noticed was the thin ribbon of blue stretching westward along Minnesota's southern boundary and then into South Dakota. It's a county map, and these are not blue counties. But it appears the mapmaker was determined to create contiguous nations: that is, if you're anywhere in the blue, you can get to any other place in the blue without having to pass through foreign territory, and same if you're anywhere in the red nation. No islands, in other words, and the narrow strip of blue across southern Minnesota is just a bridge connecting the blue Twin Cities with the blue Denver metro: a fortuitous result for a friend of mine, about the only male liberal in Rock County, Minnesota's southwestern-most county, which voted for Trump by 68 to 30 percent. My countryman, before and after the divorce!
Things work out less well for the Democrats of Dallas, the capital city of the red nation even though its county voted for Biden by 65 to 33 percent. No islands, so Dallas gets the color of the surrounding sea. And it looks like I might need a passport to see the Twins play the Royals in Kansas City, notwithstanding that Jackson County, Missouri, voted for Biden by 60-38. Too bad, Kansas Citians, maybe some of our foreign aid will find its way to you.
By chance, I saw this map, which aroused my curiosity about election returns in different venues, on the same day that Trump insisted, in an interview on NPR, that there'd been "massive fraud" in the 2020 election. The interviewer, Steve Inskeep, did a decent job of confronting him with facts—a good enough job so that Trump hung up on him. It would be hard in an interview, but I'd like to hear the conspiracy mongers explain the uniformity of the 2020 election result when compared to the result four years earlier. Trump kept telling Inskeep stuff like, "You gotta take a look at what happened in Wisconsin" and "You should see what they're finding out in Pennsylvania." But there wasn't anything happening in these states that wasn't happening everywhere else, too. Four years after Trump lost the national vote to Clinton by 2.1 percent, he lost to Biden by 4.5 percent. So he slipped, in the aggregate vote, by 2.4 percent. In Wisconsin, he slipped by just 1 percent. In Pennsylvania, he slipped by 2 percent. He went backwards by 3 percent in Michigan and by 4 in Arizona. These states performed like the rest of the country did, but the modest shifts changed the result in the electoral college, and thus they were beset by "massive fraud." Does Trump think there was "massive fraud" in Kansas, where he did 5 points worse than in 2016? How about in Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming? He did 3 points worse in all of them. You can look these things up. He did 2 points worse in South Carolina, but still won it by 12: a fair election in the Palmetto State, as anyone can easily see, "but you wouldn't believe the stuff they're finding in Pennsylvania" (which also shifted 2 points toward the Dems).
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