U.S. Regional Clashes Behind Obama Versus Romney

U.S. Regional Clashes Behind Obama Versus Romney
By Colin Woodard Nov 11, 2012 6:30 PM ET




(Bloomberg) Last week’s election demonstrated, once again, that America’s most essential and abiding divisions are not between red states and blue states, conservatives and liberals, or even the faithful and the secular. They’re cultural, the result of differences that can be traced all the way back to the rival colonial projects established on our continent three and four centuries ago.

Our political divisions are rooted in 11 disparate regional cultures, as I explained in a book that was excerpted on Bloomberg View last year. These regions -- separate nations, really, including Yankeedom, Tidewater, New Netherland, New France, Deep South, Greater Appalachia, the Midlands, First Nation, the Far West, the Left Coast, El Norte -- have been hiding in plain sight throughout our history. You see them outlined on linguists’ dialect maps, cultural anthropologists’ maps of material culture regions, and maps of religious regions, political geography and historical patterns of settlement.

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Ambitious Energy

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential challenger, is a Yankee from Michigan and Massachusetts, who nevertheless chose to run on a platform emphasizing individual liberty, and to select as his running mate a devotee of Ayn Rand. Romney’s stump speeches emphasized the need to curtail government intrusion and unlock the energy of individual ambition. Taxes on the wealthy and unspecified public services and programs were to be reduced and military spending increased. This was a pitch to the Appalachian ideal, and an effort to rally the individualistic regional cultures around his banner. (One reason this was sometimes a tough sell was that Romney himself is actually a Yankee who, as governor of Massachusetts, had spearheaded government-mandated health-care reforms, and also an adherent of a Yankee-founded religion -- Mormonism -- which shares the utopian and communitarian impulses of the early Puritans.)

With this background in mind, the county-by-county results from Tuesday’s election offer few surprises. Obama dominated Yankeedom, sweeping 58 of 63 New England counties, and dominating the Yankee-founded tier of the Northeast, from upstate New York and the Western Reserve of Ohio to northern Illinois and the Upper Great Lakes states. He routed Romney in New Netherland and won 39 of 53 counties on the Left Coast. Add the overwhelming support of the regions first colonized by Spain (where voters were unimpressed with Romney’s immigration policies) and you have the “blue” coalition that has supported the Democratic candidate for six presidential elections running. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-11/u-s-regional-clashes-behind-obama-versus-romney.html