Ohio was an abolitionist state -- Harriet Beecher Stowe was an Ohioan. If it really were the free states against the slave states, John Kerry would be getting his transition team together.

On the other hand... check out this comparison with 1896.

Actually, you're probably on to something:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/110304V.html

I like to think I am on to something - I just haven't figured out what yet.

So, Alan, now I'm a racist homophobe?

Considering how the growth of the west and south is fueled by the exodus from the Northeast, it's jest us racist homophobes moving out of the light like cockroaches scrambling from the kitchen, eh?

Hmph. I know, I know, you didn't say it... but tell me that isn't the story the pictures are trying to tell?

I don't know but you are right, that is the implication. Is there any truth to the co-incidence? <p>I suspect that underlying the two maps may be other factors, economic especially, that cause the similarlity. I recall reading a great thick book on the economics of colonial America which stated that one of the real reasons slavery did not continue in the north - and it did continue to the 1830s here in Canada so we have no right to be smug - is that the crops that grew in the north did not require slave labour for their production. Economics also fuels political belief and when you look at the map here of the voting by county in 2004, it is clear that there are also rural and urban issues at play as well - and even water versus inland, which is weird. I do not know why the economics or social community of urban life or access to navigable water makes for a difference but I think it is fair to say that is does in some way.<p>One point, John. I am not quite sure where you live so the unintended slight was not personal! If you happen, however, to be a southern inland country dweller I have just buried myself further on this point, I suspect.

I live in Kansas, just across the river from Missouri. Where we free-staters fought the slave-staters coming out of Missouri in the "Bloody Kansas" period of pre-Civil War America. And where one county, where Kansas University is, went blue this year. All the other big university counties (Wichita State and Kansas State) went red, too.

Like you said, it's more complicated than the map really shows - but the people publishing the maps (and I don't mean you, but the original poster of it) aren't helping the dialogue any!

One think that is undeniable is the success of "the red" - a colour I still have a hard time associating with conservative. Perhaps the real problem is that the movement of whatever Bush is moving (by which I mean I have no idea what "values-based" is supposed to mean as I know what a value is and it is not morality) is being improperly defined by all sides. The neo-cons and Tories on the right are having a hard time co-opting it and, of course, the vocal left is repulsed by it. <p>I bet it has not been truly defined so that it cannot be understood let alone grapped with and opposed. After 9/11, one of my first thoughts - along with the others who thought of it before me and got it written down first - was that irony is over. For some, perhaps, it truly was over while others let it back in. Say what you like about the supporters of the President, they are positive and they believe. The oppposition needs to give its supporters the same experience - all great politicians do.

The good people at Snopes–always a great source of information on nothing and everything–actually wrote an article about this last week: here is the site.

Didn't LBJ make some comment about "delivering the South to the Republican Party" by signing the Civil Rights Act? Just askin'.

The otherwise free flea disdains the comparison which started this thread. What is represented, however, is simply a matter of fact - unlike the offensive cartooning Ms. Rice to which he also links and rightly shuns as nothing but a racist slander. The difference is that this discussion is valid if only to refute a simplistic impliction as well as to explore perhaps the uncomfortable. Failing to think freely in troubled times is like listening only to the banjo because your cousin plays one badly - there is no connection to a free mind. Getting in line is what the tyrant asks of you.

Nils has forwarded an interesting link that maps the relative 2004 US election vote according to the population first by state and also by county and then by distorted border drafting. It is interesting that as more factors get introduced the simplistic comparison is defeated but so is the effectiveness of the graphical representation of the data.<p><center><img src="images/2004d/countycart3070small.png" vspace="20"></center>It is difficult what I am to particularly draw from this representation.