Blue Islands, Red Seas

We’ve all seen the map of the 2004 presidential election, with the "three coasts" of blue states parted by the red sea of conservatism. That’s fine and good if we simply want to understand electoral politics on a state-by-state basis. Trouble is, that’s not an accurate way to understand what happened on Nov. 2.

The real great American divide is not between the red and blue states, it is between urban and rural America.

Although the popular vote was just a three-point spread, the acreage of the counties that supported Kerry were just a fraction of the landscape. According to USA Today, the counties voting Democratic encompassed 511,700 square miles, a mere 17 percent of the country, while the less densely populated Bush Country dominates from coast to coast. (Alaska was not included in the USA Today data).

Almost every state — red or blue — had urban areas that voted overwhelming for Kerry as well as counties (in which the livestock frequently outnumber the people) that voted for Bush by a 3-1 margin. For example, in John Ashcroft's home state of Missouri, Bush received 54 percent of the vote, making it a red state. But Kerry won the city of St. Louis by an overwhelming 81 percent; he also won the two other most populous counties in the state, St. Louis and Jackson counties, according to data from CNN.com.

With the exception of the uber-conservative states of Utah, Nebraska, Alaska and Oklahoma, nearly every "red" state with major metropolitan centers had pockets that strongly supported Kerry, including Colorado (Denver and Boulder), Georgia (Atlanta), and Indiana (Gary).

Conversely, although Kerry handily won Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and Oregon, the vast majority of counties in the blue states showed a clear preference for Bush. For example, in Pennsylvania, 54 of the 67 counties went for Bush, but Kerry carried the state, thanks to strong support in the Philadelphia (81 percent) and Pittsburgh metro areas.

Whether a state votes Democratic or Republican is most commonly determined by the percentage of its voters that live in urban areas. "It's bogus to say there are red and blue states," says Phil Klinkner, professor of government at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. Klinkner points out that rural voters tend to be older, whiter, more conservative and family oriented, and therefore vote Republican.

City dwellers tend to be more diverse and educated, he says. "The Democrats have been the urban party since the New Deal," Klinkner says, and urban dwellers are less likely to be frequent churchgoers and have a higher level of education and more advanced degrees than their rural counterparts. More than 70 percent of voters in New York, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia voted against Bush in both 2000 and 2004. The president did win the largest cities in Texas as well as in San Diego, although not by a wide a margin.

San Francisco State University Professor Richard DeLeon says that voting tendencies "are not just the urbanity (of the community), although that is a factor." DeLeon co-authored a study this year entitled "Identity Politics and Local Political Culture" that analyzed 30 communities and discussed how "place matters in determining a region's political culture.”

DeLeon created a "new political culture" index rating based on seven factors that indicate how liberal or conservative a community is likely to be. These factors include the amount of single working women, the presence and acceptability of gays and lesbians, the racial diversity, and the percentage of people who do not adhere to a religion.

"You have to go beyond rural and urban to see what is the makeup of the people," DeLeon says. These differences explain why some cities like Boston and San Francisco are highly liberal, while communities such as Birmingham, Alabama and York, Penn. are conservative.