The geography of presidential elections in the United States has perpetually been a topic of great interest and great controversy. In the past two decades alone, the two-party system has produced complex voting patterns that make it difficult to classify national voting behavior.
Since the 2000 elections, presidential politics were explained by the “red state versus blue state narrative” that geographically partitioned the country into Republican and Democratic bastions (Harrington, Michael. “Election Geography 2008.” Purple Nation. 24 July 2008. Available:http://policriticblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/election-geography-2008.html). Indeed, the increasing mobility of the American population has increased residential segregation and created “landslide counties (Bishop, Bill. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Houghton Mifflin,2008).” An examination of longer-term voting patterns at a smaller-scale, however, indicates that the centrist political sentiments dominate a swayable electorate. In fact, the majority of U.S. counties have changed allegiances over time, with only a portion of counties showing static support for one party. At the national scale, major geographical realignments of party support can be seen between the 1996 and 2000 elections. Moreover, states have rarely shown political unity within themselves, with long-standing distinctions among U.S. Census regions and urban, suburban, and rural areas. Indeed, arguments for both polarized partisanship and a nation of moderates hold equal weight in a political landscape characterized by such complexity and change.
This map series explores the geography of presidential elections from 1992 to 2008. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Dave Leip’s Atlas, it examines voting patterns at the county level in order to capture the dynamic nature of electoral politics in the United States.