{"id":3196,"date":"2008-11-19T08:37:36","date_gmt":"2008-11-19T15:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2008\/11\/19\/southern-strategies-laid-bare\/"},"modified":"2008-11-19T15:03:46","modified_gmt":"2008-11-19T22:03:46","slug":"southern-strategies-laid-bare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2008\/11\/19\/southern-strategies-laid-bare\/","title":{"rendered":"Southern Strategies Laid Bare"},"content":{"rendered":"

I, um, I already said that<\/a>*.\u00c2\u00a0 More or less.\u00c2\u00a0 Though if you look at what I wrote on the topic and correlate\u00c2\u00a0what I\u00c2\u00a0wrote\u00c2\u00a0to the maps, some things seem a little off — the “McCain Belt” where McCain outperformed Bush\u00c2\u00a0did not touch into South Carolina (the regions probably already saturated beforehand?) — the state\u00c2\u00a0for the historical prototypical and most rawly\u00c2\u00a0racist and populist\u00c2\u00a0political appeal I referenced in Ben Tillman.<\/p>\n

But the map is fairly obvious, and anyone with a half way decent working understanding of American history knows what that blue streak was, and why they voted for Obama, as well what that red streak was, and why it voted for McCain.\u00c2\u00a0 The thing about the “Obama Belt<\/a>“, though, is it exists in this form since, I guess 1968 — and probably in different mechinitions of the same since time immemorial (Black Belt Conservative Tory versus Crudely Populist? and on to Yep!\u00c2\u00a0 How the soil lined up during\u00c2\u00a0the Cretaceous Period!)\u00c2\u00a0 On that score, it’s not been “picking presidents” at all, and still isn’t — .<\/p>\n

I did think of another interesting effect to\u00c2\u00a0come up\u00c2\u00a0with on the NY Times interactive electoral map<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Starting with the 96 percent figure and going backward, do you want to know what percentage of Southern Baptists you have to get to before the percentages flip from McCain to Obama?\u00c2\u00a0 It is within one percent.\u00c2\u00a0 If you take all the counties that have any Southern Baptists at all, the vote will go for McCain.\u00c2\u00a0 If you add the counties that have essentially no Baptists, only then will the vote\u00c2\u00a0flip over\u00c2\u00a0for Obama.\u00c2\u00a0 But maybe this means roughly squat and is indicative of nothing, I’d have to think for a minute.<\/p>\n

* Groan.\u00c2\u00a0 Edit replaced to what I meant to link.\u00c2\u00a0 Trust me, you don’t want to know what I had accidentally linked originally — incongruity to the nth degree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I, um, I already said that*.\u00c2\u00a0 More or less.\u00c2\u00a0 Though if you look at what I wrote on the topic and correlate\u00c2\u00a0what I\u00c2\u00a0wrote\u00c2\u00a0to the maps, some things seem a little off — the “McCain Belt” where McCain outperformed Bush\u00c2\u00a0did not touch into South Carolina (the regions probably already saturated beforehand?) — the state\u00c2\u00a0for the historical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}