As the tiresome rhetoric and stupid votes of Blue Dogs fades into the past, leaving us a “pure” progressive House, let’s not forget that John Boehner will ultimately have the same problem as Pelosi with some of the new House seats. The Times has a great interactive House map, and one of the interesting features is the ability to flip between years.
Using that feature, it’s pretty easy to identify districts that aren’t afraid to elect a Democrat, and have done so in the recent past. A few good examples are TX-23 and CO-3 in the Southwest, and MN-8, WI-7 and MI-1 in the upper Midwest. There are also some Northeast districts that chose moderate Democrats after Republicans stopped allowing moderation in their party (NY-19, 20, 24 and maybe 25), and some that will elect a Democrat even though they’re pretty red (the Dakotas).
While Boehner’s holding off the 15 teabagging members who want to abolish the Department of Education, he’s also going to have to satisfy members who need to be elected in a swing district. He won’t have to do that right away, because he has a huge majority, but if he wants to keep the House for a few cycles, he’s going to need to do something to appease these Red Cats.
Also, too: If you don’t understand that the big divide in America today is between urban and rural/suburban, take a good look at that map. Except for the communist Northeast and the Mexicans in the Southwest, Democrats live in island colonies of urban safe districts in a sea of rural and suburban red.
Kryptik
Somehow, I can’t imagine ‘Moderate Republicans’ or Republicans in swing districts to be…all that moderate. They were near monolithic during Bush. They were literally monolithic the last two years. What makes you think they’ll do anything but dutifully toe the party line? After all, they just got a mandate from the American People themselves to stop Maobama at any cost!! Silly libz!!
Now excuse me while I try to prevent myself from breaking my monitor at work with my forehead.
debbie
It’ll be interesting to see how this falls out. Sadly, many people will have to suffer in the process.
Listening to all their pronouncements and chest thumping yesterday, I realized that if they denounced Obama as presuming to be Messianic, this latest version of the Republican Party can only be considered to be The Wrath of God.
Morbo
OK, but what effect will redistricting have on all that?
And MI-1 just elected a man with no political experience despite campaign positions to privatize Social Security and levy a 23% national sales tax. Stupak’s personal popularity was pretty much all that was keeping it big-D Democratic.
Kryptik
@debbie:
I swear I’ve seen this exact phrase used in regards to the election, in all earnestness.
Kryptik
@Morbo:
It’s obvious, isn’t it?
The fabled Permanent Republican Majority becomes a reality as the country wholesale bucks it’s satanic liberal overlords and returns to the idyllic America that never had any of those damn soshulist bastards mucking things up, and everyone had two cars in their garage and a chicken in the pot and there were no bla-oh, sorry, getting ahead of myself.
But yeah. Redistricting power going to a Republican House….again…is why I have seizing fits about the coming few years.
cleek
and the GOP redistricting is going to make sure there are as few of those as they can manage
joe from Lowell
Vermont is urban?
Northern New Mexico is urban?
Your statement is false. Democrats do not live in urban islands, surrounded by red suburbs and rural areas. Democrats control the cities, Republicans control the rural areas, and the suburbs are the battleground.
MikeTheZ
OT: A brilliantly depressing story about the state of America. Needless to say, its in the British media.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-america-is-now-officially-for-sale-2125447.html
Steve
Suburbs have been the battleground since at least Nixon. Obama did very well in the suburbs, picking up affluent districts like MI-9 (which we barely held this time). Part of this is changing suburban attitudes, part of it is the increased urbanization of the suburbs (which is a racial euphemism). The suburbs have become more cosmopolitan, and the sort of people who can’t handle diversity have mostly moved out to the exurbs.
mistermix
@joe from Lowell: “Other than the communist Northeast” – that includes Vermont. And the Santa Fe / Taos area is certainly not urban, but come on – it’s hardly Arkansas.
I agree the suburbs are the battleground, generally, and we lost (at least in New York).
Bobbyk
Yeah, what kryptic said @ 1.
FlipYrWhig
lolredkatz
joe from Lowell
Mistermix,
And why are you using a map of the results of one (1) highly eccentric election to draw broad conclusions about political geography? Did the suburban, midwestern districts that went Democratic in both 2006 and 2008 suddenly become de-urbanized in 2010?
General Stuck
From the pie holes of our new wingnut masters
You see, only republicans can have “most historic elections”.
Democrats can only have ACORN engineered country stealing elections.
Comrade Darkness
Nothing makes me happier at the moment than Rand Paul affirming he will filibuster any bill to raise the debt ceiling. I realize that’s not Boehner’s purview, directly, but it’s certainly going to be his problem.
Be careful what you wish for, bitches.
Felonious Wench
@joe from Lowell:
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
My suburb, on the edge of Houston, is turning blue election by election.
NickM
@Steve: Steve said what I was trying to write – urban vs. suburban/rural does not quite capture the dynamic.
S. cerevisiae
Watch for Don Ness, Mayor of Duluth to run for Oberstar’s old seat in MN 8th. I give him a very good chance of taking it.
MattF
The WaPo has repeatedly shown this map of Maryland counties voting in the O’Malley-Erlich election. What they don’t mention is that the population of Garrett County is a tad under 30,000, while the population of Montgomery County is a tad under 1,000,000.
Cacti
@General Stuck:
They seized control of 1/2 of the Legislature.
Unprecedented.
wonkie
I guess I’m not as optimistic as you all. I don’t think that Republican over reach is going to bring Republicorp down any time soon.
1. The Noise Machine will lie lie lie continuously between now ans 2012, the same up is down lying they always do. This means that a huge percentage of the electorate will go inot the 2012 election believing the opposite of reality just as they did this time.
2. the rest of the corporate media will not do jourtnalism. They will provide the usual he said/she said and when village pundits yap it will be primariy the kind of nonsense we’ve alraedy heard from Broder. The Village will support gutting the health care actr in the name of bipartisanship, for example.
3. I don’t have much faith in the Democrats to stand up even with the Blud Dogs gone. All tha sorportae money that supported the Republicorp will be circulating and lobbyinnsts will be telling Dems that the money will be used either for themor against hhem deppending on how they vote.
4. It IS the economy, stupid. In the end if the Rethugs et rejected inn 2012 it will be because the economy still sucks. If he economy improves they will get relected.
General Stuck
The trouble with these red/blue maps of the US, is that most of that red are prairie dog towns and rubble filled open plains, at least west of the MS. Similar in parts of the south and midwest, but less so. Leaves the impression we are surrounded by a sea of wingnuts, but really it is a wide ranging collection of mud puddle burgs and villes separated by a lot of nothing.
Funkhauser
@NickM: @Steve: Thirded. When you add in the fact that some races were won 48-46% or 51-49%, no, urban v. rural doesn’t quite describe it.
gbear
We’re in trouble in MN. The state house and senate both flipped into republican hands, and the governor’s race was so close that we went to an automatic recount., although democrat Mark Dayton is the current and likely winner.
Tim Pawlenty will remain the active governorship until the recount is decided. This gives Pawlenty and the new (religious) conservative legislature a chance to blast through as many bills as possible while they’ve got that window.
Tim is going to use this opportunity to enhance his presidential aspirations. If there’s one thing we’ve seen, Tim is willing to do ANYTHING no matter how much it hurts MN citizens if it will make him look bigger in the eyes of the Grover Nordquist & Co. This could likely be a bloodbath for women’s rights, gay rights, voter’s rights and for the poor and middleclass overall.
Steve
@Cacti: Let’s not underestimate the historic Republican wave here. There hasn’t been an election that left one party with this big a majority in Congress since 2008.
joe from Lowell
@Felonious Wench:
Back in 2001-2003, the Republican press would often crow about how the faster-growing counties in America were all Republican strongholds – and they were right. Exurban/rural counties that went from 5000 resident to 50,000 residents between 1998 and 2001 were almost all Bush-voting counties.
What they failed to recognize, however, was that those people moving into the counties were turning them bluer. The last the Republicans redrew the election map to keep themselves safe was just a few years before 2006.
Cacti
@Steve:
Yes, they have a large majority, but in one chamber of Congress.
And in the House, for the most part, a majority is a majority is a majority.
Not taking the Senate was an unforced error on their part, brought about by nominating candidates too extreme for statewide populations vs. individual district populations.
TheMightyTrowel
@General Stuck:
You can find a similar map of the 2010 election in Britain here.
Red = labour; Blue = conservatives
The red areas are the communists up north and the cities elsewhere; the blue areas are the large stretches of open country. If you mouse over the map, individual constituencies should pop up – they are closely tied to population so all the tiny red dots represent multiple constituencies while some counties only have 1 or 2 rural MPs.
bemused
@gbear:
I have no doubt Pawlenty will use the time until Dayton is confirmed as winner to throw as many bags of shit around the capitol that he can get away with. Two big issues are how to deal with the $6B budget deficit and whether to accept $1.4B in expanded Medicaid recovery by Jan 15. Horrors if Pawlenty still has the reins in hands. We know how much he cares about people in need. MN definitely knows the recount ropes after the Franken/Colemn recount but the MN GOP will try to slow down the process as long as possible to allow Pawlenty time to do damage. I’m assuming the Dayton lawyers are very sharp but I hope they are good at deflecting bogus delay tactics. The MN GOP already used the fake bag of ballots in a trunk ruse 2 years ago. I wonder what they will try this time.
Chris
I agree with the consensus in the comments; suburbs are the battleground.
Urban and rural areas are committed long before the campaigning even starts, but the burbs are fickle. Lots of social liberalism and economic conservatism. Lots of the “government get off my lawn, but keep my trains running on time.” No strong identity tying them to one side or the other, unlike the urban and rural areas. All that makes it the ultimate prize in the elections. The party that manages to secure their enduring loyalty is the party that’ll win this.
joe from Lowell
@Cacti:
So, is anyone seeing any indication of the Republicans learning from this mistake?
Martin
Republicans don’t tack left to save seats. They just don’t do it. Look at the Mainers in the Senate. They’re both vulnerable in their next re-election because they’re going to face Teabaggers out of some Steven King novel and they’re going to have to tack right to cover that, and then they’ll get beat in the general. And in spite of that, they voted down the line with DeMint and Inhofe these last 2 years.
They just don’t do it. They double down, they yell louder, they try and draw out more of the electorate rather than try and shift the moderates. McCain was losing in the polls in 2008. Did he tack left? No, he brought on Palin.
arguingwithsignposts
@General Stuck:
Head/Desk – we get two whole years of this craven, lying bullshit from all corners. AARRRGGHH!
arguingwithsignposts
@General Stuck:
Sometimes it helps to have the red/blue maps with proportional sizes, which someone did in 2008. I can’t recall where, exactly.
artem1s
Except for the communist Northeast and the Mexicans in the Southwest, Democrats live in island colonies of urban safe districts in a sea of rural and suburban red.
not so sure about that. I watched the precinct by precinct tally of the Franken/Coleman recount pretty closely. yes, the urban districts put him over the top but suburbs kept him in the race. because of the population disparity Coleman literally had to pull 2:1or 3:1 in most of the ‘red’ precincts just to keep up.
This is why rabid, screeching, foaming at the mouth energizing is so vital to the GOP. Usually they burn their bridges with one-campaign issues (you can only put an anti-gay marriage amendment on the state ballot once). This year it was a woman/feminazi speaker and secret muslim in the White House with a dash of death panels. In Iowa the 2012 caucuses the gay marriage thing will be front and center again (a whole bunch of those liberal leaning, judges lost their seats this go round). Who knows what else Rove et al will pull out of their bag of tricks in two years but expect it to be nasty and divisive.
But sooner or later the kids who are growing up in those non-homogeneous suburbs are going to start voting at a larger percentage than the dying off ‘greediest generation’ septuagenarians/ octogenarians. The challenge is going to be getting them to the polls on a consistent basis and that isn’t going to happen until someone starts engaging the issues they care about instead of just paying lip service to them.
Face it, 20-30 year-olds just aren’t going to pay attention to ‘old people’ issues like social security and health care for a couple of decades or more. Not saying those issues shouldn’t be part of the platform but progressive candidates have to actually show some interest in progressive causes outside of safety net issues if they want to engage the youth vote on a consistent basis.
Really, how long would you support a party or candidate who kept treating you like a four year old asking for candy? Sooner or later someone will realize that the idea of building a new infrastructure/society will turn these voters out. They are energized about the future, not planning on which gated community they want to retire to. The Dems can pay attention and get their vote, or they can keep telling them that they have to wait their turn, again, and again.
WayneL
Look where the educated people are. And the minorities. Both are concentrated in urban areas. The swing districts are a mix of college-educated and not. Democrats have become the party of college-educated and Republicans are the party of the high school-educated. This is as part of the great divide between urban and rural, too.
Elizabelle
@debbie:
Ah, there was your problem.
I have stayed scrupulously away from news sites and TV, and am happier for it.
Will check in maybe next week or so, once the dust (or sh*t) settles, but some distance is good.
We live in a world that is at least 6,000 years old. Its problems and opportunities will be there on resurfacing.
And the GOP cannot go from electioneering to governing easily.
It’s a lot harder.
debbie
@ Kryptik:
I don’t remember having read that specific phrase anywhere, but with all the religious allusions being tossed about by conservatives, I’m sure it’s been used before. I just think “Wrath of God” is the only way to explain all the demonizing of the past 2 years.
@ Elizabelle:
Good luck with that plan. I don’t see the dust/shit settling anytime soon.
lol
I believe you’re looking for this article from 2004, The Urban Archipelago.
Hubertus Bigend
Except for the communist Northeast and the Mexicans in the Southwest, Democrats live in island colonies of urban safe districts in a sea of rural and suburban red.
Not all non-white rural Democrats are Hispanic. Look at that map again and you will see where the black-majority counties of the old plantation country are located. Native American reservations likewise.
Davis X. Machina
$5.00+/gal. gas in those red seas surrounding those blue archipelagos will make for interesting times. Do their denizens start driving hybrids, or do we invade Alberta and take their oil sands?
PhoenixRising
@General Stuck: NM-2, isn’t it?
Leaves the impressionWhile we are surrounded by a sea of wingnuts and their cattle…Fixt. In all seriousness, though–NM-2 is a great example of why this post is a display of confusion. Harry Teague was as conservative (def. as ‘turn your clock back to 1959’) as it gets in the Democratic party, but it took a wave in ’08 to get him into the seat.
Now that Steve Pearce has it back, I doubt very much that keeping to the center is his main concern. He’s more engaged with the problem of what the bag limit on undocumented border crossers is for his ranching voters.
arguingwithsignposts
@Davis X. Machina:
We got a foretaste of that in 2008 (everybody forgets the huge gas spikes for some reason).
Very bad things.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@S. cerevisiae: MN-8 is a strange district. It’s where the red in “redneck” symbolizes socialism. And that’s only because the Finns have moderated away from flat out communism over the last century.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@S. cerevisiae: MN-8 is a strange district. Itās where the red in āredneckā symbolizes sockalism. And thatās only because the Finns have moderated away from flat out communism over the last century.
JohnR
@Comrade Darkness:
Sorry; I’ll believe that when I see it. His Dad, maybe. Rand is simply an unprincipled hack, as far as I can tell. When money talks, Rand will join the walk, 10:1.
dude
my entire experience with the “rural-urban divide” has been people in rural areas think they’re better than city-dwellers, suburbanites pretend to live in urban areas while vocally wishing they still lived on the farm (even when their families have been off farms for generations) and urbanites are too busy living to notice or care about the “divide.”
JohnR
@Elizabelle:
?
They don’t want or need to – the only GOP goals are:
1. power,
2. eradicate every “liberal” bit of government since at least 1900, and
3. profit.
“Governing” is not even a distant afterthought. Why should they worry – any national problems will always be the Democrats’ fault, according to the GOP, the media and most of the Democrats. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
Davis X. Machina
Stadluft macht frei. Since the Middle Ages and the days of the Hanseatic League, and since I read Hendrik Willem Van Loon
TheMightyTrowel
@Davis X. Machina:
I’ll bet Canadia would give Alberta away if Obama asked nicely. Every canadian I’ve ever met (even the ones from Alberta) apologise for Alberta – the same way I used to apologise for Bush.
Alwhite
@Comrade Darkness:
I hope they do refuse to raise the ceiling. It would be entertaining to watch the country circling the drain while they explain how that is a good thing.
@MattF:
They do that every time the Rs have a gain as if land mass has a vote. Add Wyoming and the Dakotas together in the Red dress and they almost have the population of NYC but they look sooooo much bigger it must be important!
@joe from Lowell:
Whats to learn? If the baggers are as rabid in ’12 they will outperform the party in the poorly attended primary elections. The Party did not want a lot of the nutballs they got but lost to them.
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
For years the mining companies provided everything for free (I worked with a guy from Hibbing, never bought a pencil or paper for school all was provided) it was part of a deal to not pay taxes for the ore extraction. Those guys were so far left the have become right.
Michael E Sullivan
Even here in connecticut, the divide is pretty much the same, it’s just that the demographics are such that blue ends up better in the end most of the time. Every one of our congressional districts contains some cities and inner (purple to blueish) suburbs or arty/college towns in them.
Generally, the rural districts go Red, while the urban centers go blue. Inner suburbs that tend be either high-education or ethnically diverse go moderately blue (but not as deep as the cities), outer suburbs that tend to be mostly white are usually moderately red. The stepford towns (Darien, Greenwich, New Canaan — what most people who don’t live here think when you say “Connecticut”) are about as deep red as we get in the state, more so than the hick towns. Some of the rural towns with arty-touristy centers have enough retired DFHs from NYC and Boston to act like the inner suburbs (Salisbury, Kent, Deep River).
One interesting bit is that people think greenwich when you say CT. The media will act like CT is electing democrats because that’s what the “elites” in greenwich, etc. want. But if CT went the way of greenwich we’d never touch a democrat. CT votes blue because there’s a lot more of Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford than of Greenwich.
anticontrarian
Islands whose tax revenues, it should be continuously noted and never forgotten, provide the economic support the rural/suburban red sea relies on for its continued viability as a place to live.
But of course it’s the leftish in the cities who are the damn socialists.
Socraticsilence
@Kryptik:
the last two years- they didn’t exist, they were removed in 2006 and 2008- note that even at the height of his power-2004 or so Bush was ambushed by his own members on things like Social Security privatization- now they are more monolithic than Dems but they’re not nearly as lockstep as the 2008 GOP.
Sasha
Not Red Cats. Red Dogs.
We have already have Blue Dogs and Yellow Dogs. In politics, Dogs should come in all three primary colors.
bushworstpresidentever
@General Stuck:
But don’t forget that those rural, low population prairie dog states are overrepresented in the electoral college, starting off with 3 or 4 electoral votes each, and presenting a hurdle to the election of a Democratic President….
Arclite
@Kryptik:
I have to agree with Kryptic on this on. Here in Hawaii, one of the bluest states in the nation, we have a Repub rep (heh, only for the rest of the year). He was elected by a mere 40% plurality in the special election to replace Neil Abercrombie. Despite that, Charles Djou voted with the republicans 90% of the time. If there were ever a Repub that would vote moderately, it would be here, but it didn’t happen.
debbie
@JohnR:
The elections were 3 days ago. Using the same standard that Republicans used for Democrats and noting that there is still unemployment in the United States, I can say with all confidence that the Republicans have failed. Utterly, horribly, and in a very unpatriotic manner.
SciVo
One analysis of the 2008 election results was that basically, the urbanization of the suburbs has caused them to vote that way too. Seems pretty simple to me: the more you have to band together to preserve the green that your genes crave — because all the empty lots have been developed and no longer have crickets and frogs and ad hoc baseball diamonds and makeshift BMX trails — the more sense of solidarity you have and the more liberal you vote. That’s the cultural divide of population density: whether people have to all pull together for the betterment of all, or not.
Tim Ellis
http://www.urbanarchipelago.com
It’s dated (a rant from after the 2004 election) but man is it a good read.
Once you get to a certain population density, a functional government becomes an obvious necessity, and you vote blue if you want the lights to stay on and the garbage to magically disappear each morning.