Data & Polls
The popular narrative of Red and Blue is based on Electoral College delegate results for presidential elections. After viewing the stark patterns on the Red-Blue EC state maps, analysts reviewed the post-election exit polls, then compared the two results. But the two sets of data-electoral college votes and exit polls-are not really comparable. One represents the geographical region of a state (i.e. where a voter lives) and the other represents voters grouped by various profiles or characteristics irrespective of where these voters live. When exit polls showed that church-going rural whites, men, and married women tended to vote Red or Republican while minorities, single women, and non church-going urban dwellers tended to vote Blue or Democrat the quick narrative attributed these characteristics to different regions of the country and a convenient stereotype was born.
In the words of humorist Dave Barry, Red voters were “ignorant, racist, fascist, knuckle-dragging, NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating, tobacco-juice-dribbling, gun-fondling, religious fanatic, rednecks,” while Blue were "godless, unpatriotic, pierced-nose, Volvo-driving, France-loving, leftwing Communist, latte-sucking, tofu-chomping, holistic-wacko, neurotic, vegan, weenie perverts.”
Now, most people take this simplistic narrative as the tongue-in-cheek humor it was meant. But too many others have latched onto it as a self-serving confirmation of our politics. But what this simplistic narrative has done is inadvertently superimposed party voting preferences over cultural and lifestyle preferences associated with different regions across the country.
The only way to debunk the myths is by gathering more detailed data. We have done this for our research presented on the About the Politics page, but you can do your own analysis by accessing the same data through various sources at the following Internet links:
Wikipedia Overview of Elections 2000 and 2004.
These overviews offer a wealth of information and visula aids, including cartograms and maps of the election results.
Also, for a good overview see David Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.
For a look at historical Electoral College results go here.
More interesting maps and cartograms here.
Voting Data
- CNN Election 2004 results by state and county
- NY Times Election 2004 results by Congressional District.
- USA Today: Votes by States and Counties, 2000 and 2004.
Census Data
- US Census Bureau's American FactFinder for decennial census data.
- Gateway to Census 2000.
Polling Data Sources
- American National Election Studies - exit and opinion polling and surveys
- Pew Charitable Trusts Election Polling
- The Polling Report - election polls
- CNN Polls Election 2000
- Zogby Polls
