Winning in a purple America

Marsha Mercer
Published: November 10, 2008

WASHINGTON

By the measures that count, Barack Obama won a clear victory Tuesday — taking 52 percent of the popular vote to John McCain’s 46 percent.

In the Electoral College vote, Obama crushed McCain. With only Missouri still in doubt, Obama won 364 electoral votes — nearly 100 more than the 270 needed — to McCain’s 162.

But looking at the colorful U.S. maps that show the 2008 presidential vote in red or blue, you’d think John McCain had won in a landslide. Wide swaths of the country are crimson.

Those maps, of course, don’t take population into account. The blue stipples and streaks along the coasts and around urban centers represent areas with many more voters. Nor do these maps show
how close the contests were; the state or county is either red or blue.

Obama’s mantra is that there’s no red America and no blue America. It’s a nice rhetorical image — and it happens to reflect a reality of the 2008 election.

To get a true sense of where voters are in 2008, you need a cartogram. That’s a map that has been resized and reshaped to reflect population. It’s as though the map is made of taffy that’s been pulled
into a new shape.

Cartograms tell a more nuanced story about the election than either ordinary maps or numbers. To be sure, there are red and blue strongholds in America, but much of the country is red and blue —
purple.

Mark Newman, a physics professor at the University of Michigan, is a wizard with cartograms. He’s the co-author of a world atlas of cartograms and in his spare time developed cartograms on the last two
presidential elections. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

He not only stretches and shrinks the shape of red and blue states to reflect the size of the vote, but he has also produced a cartogram using red, blue and, for closely split areas, shades of purple. This
cartogram shows purple swirling in every part of the   country.

Newman explains about the tri-color cartogram, “large portions of the country are quite evenly divided, appearing in various shades of purple, although a number of strongly Democratic (blue) areas are
visible too, mostly in the larger cities. There are also some strongly Republican areas, but most of them have relatively small populations and hence appear quite small on this map.”

Obama and his team will need to remember that the country is closely divided as they turn from campaigning to governing.

Exit polls confirm that most voters — 44 percent — consider themselves moderate. Only 22 percent of voters described themselves liberal, and 34 percent said they were conservative.

And those moderates? Sixty percent of them voted for Obama.

While McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin tried to portray Obama as a raging liberal with socialist tendencies, the public didn’t buy it. Obama received a wider victory margin than George W. Bush
had four years ago. Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote to John Kerry’s 48 percent.

Plus, Obama flipped to his column eight red states Bush won last time — Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

Obama also won over independents. Twenty nine percent of voters said they were independents — and 55 percent of them voted for Obama.

Republicans need to rebuild their party. Four years ago, exit polls found the voters tied by party ID — 37 percent said they were Republican and 37 percent Democratic. On Tuesday, 39 percent said they
were Democrats and 32 percent Republicans.

The campaign may be over, but the rhetoric lingers that Obama will push an extreme agenda. The GOP isn’t waiting to see Obama’s policies. Republicans blasted the choice of Rahm Emanuel for White
House chief of staff. Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a former Clinton White House aide, is a fierce partisan and a tough fighter.

The Republicans charged that the pick showed Obama lied about wanting a new direction in Washington. But Emanuel, like Obama, is known to be a pragmatist. He works across party lines.

A pragmatist will remember that there’s no red America and no blue America. It’s purple.

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