Voting Patterns
Some real data about states and how they voted in 2000, from two Wall Street Journal articles, each linked after the text:
Just after the 2000 election, Pete du Pont wrote his debut column for this Web site, "Gore Carries the Porn Belt," in which he noted the striking correlation between adult-movie consumption and Democratic voting. Along with inspiring a great new Best of the Web feature, "Dispatch From the Porn Belt," du Pont made an important point about what divides America at the start of the 21st century:
"There are indeed two Americas, one bicoastal, urban, industrial, and politically very liberal; the other rural, with smaller cities and towns, traditional beliefs about family and morality, and a moderate-to-conservative political outlook."
Now Thomas Byrne Edsall, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, has picked up on du Pont's theme. What defines American politics, Edsall argues, is mostly sex:
Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.
Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. . . . According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors--and better indicators of partisan inclination--than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002930
The following is part of du Pont’s article:
... in the Oct. 23 New York Times appeared a shaded map of the United States that bore an eerie resemblance to Tuesday night's results. In an article headlined "Technology Sent Wall Street Into Market for Pornography," the map shows by region the percentage of sex movies in the home-video market. Mr. Gore carried the areas with the highest percentages (40% on the West Coast and 37% in New England and the Middle Atlantic states); Mr. Bush carried the area with the lowest percentage (14% in the South), and they split the rest of the country that had middling sex movie percentages.
It sounds ridiculous, but there's a grain of truth in those comparisons. Mr. Bush carried married voters 53% to 44%, led by a similar margin in homes with children under 18, and won the "religious right," 79% to 18%. He won the South 54% to 44% and lost the Northeast 37% to 56%. His was a culturally conservative vote. And character did matter: Among voters who said they wanted an honest and trustworthy president, Mr. Bush won 80% to 15%. People who attend church weekly backed Mr. Bush 57% to 40%.
A few other patterns emerged: Mr. Gore ran strongly with the quarter of the voters with incomes under $30,000: Mr. Bush ran better than Mr. Gore with the other three-quarters. Democrats voted for Democrats and Republicans for Republicans in overwhelming percentages. And the "gender gap" is real and very deep. According to exit polls Mr. Gore won women 54% to 42%, and Mr. Bush won men 52% to 43%.
Other comparisons paint a murkier picture. Consider three important quality-of-life indicators measured state by state: five-year per capita income growth, the crime rate and the percentage of births to teenage mothers. List the 50 states and the District of Columbia in order for each, and we see that economic growth seemed to matter: Messrs. Bush and Gore evenly split high-growth states, while Mr. Bush carried 11 of the 15 low-growth ones. The crime rate didn't seem to matter: Higher-crime states favored Mr. Bush, but not by very much. More puzzling, he also won 20 of the 25 states with the highest percentage of births to teen mothers.
In short, the 2000 election was not primarily about "the economy, stupid," nor the efficiency of government, nor the number of programs proposed or their cost, nor just how government should be reinvented. It was about values like the quality of education, family and ethics, and the character and trustworthiness of the man who will next lead us. Those are not bad ways to pick a president.
It is also clear that these concerns are not evenly spread across the country. There are indeed two Americas, one bicoastal, urban, industrial, and politically very liberal; the other rural, with smaller cities and towns, traditional beliefs about family and morality, and a moderate-to-conservative political outlook.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=65000578
