This week's community poll and discussion will cover our distribution by Region (since the poll only allows 15 mutually exclusive answers, I can't do each State). Hopefully, as in the other diaries, it will also prompt a discusion of the concept & importance of State and Regionalism. It is a repeat of the prior Region poll from January 30, 2007.
Apologies for preemptive blog whoring: but even more than before, the validity of this regionalism poll depends on its being posted as a "Recommended Diary" for at least a full 24 hours in all U.S. time zones, so that it will get an equivalent representative sample of us - morning & evening west coast as well as east coast.
But do we in Daily Kos community include all parts, all regions, of the country? Are we representative of the country as a whole in this way?
Do we include folks from the South, various Heartlands, Breadbaskets, Bible belts, real Americas, as well as the northeast or coasts, etc? The poll last time suggested, frankly to my pleasant surprise, that we were remarkably representative of the U.S. as a whole in this way.
As before, there will be a separate poll for urban-suburban-rural, which is a different type of demo-geographic measure.
I would of course love to poll for all 50 States, D.C. Puerto Rico, etc. Alas, as always, Daily Kos polls are limited to a single question with up to 15 mutually exclusive categories. So beyond what specific state are you living in, this prompts a discussion a discussion of the concept of U.S. Regions and Regionalism.
The States of the United States can be grouped by Regions that share certain social-cultural-political similarities. Of course nobody agrees on which states go where, and no doubt some will disagree with the entire enterprise. In my humble opinion "Regional" divisions are as arbitrary as those of Race that we discussed previously.
But let's try anyway.
I am mostly following the same combinations I used last year, just for consistency/comparability sake. The one change I made is to combine Hawaii and Alaska (relatively small populations and small number of dKos respondents) in order to be able to add non-U.S. as the 15th category
Throughout U.S. history, different "regionalisms" made more or less sense, and have been used. In Colonial and early national history, the U.S. could be reasonably divided into New England, MidAtlantic, South and West, with the West being the lands that became the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio.
Categories that used to work are changing as internal demographics of States change. And many states are too internally heterogenous, with their own internal regionalisms to work. This is different than just Urban-Rural distinctions which we discussed in another poll in this series.
A good example known to all here in Kossack-land is Virginia, with northern (or at least northeastern) Virginia being more and more like a traditional Mid Atlantic State, and southern Virginia still being like the South. Perhaps less known is Pennsylvania, with the old joke being that it consists of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between. Simiarly, New York State is typically thought of as classic North Eastern or Mid Atlantic state, yet the southwestern part of the state is part of Appalachia. Other regions cross international lines, such as "Cascadia" which includes not only Oregon and Washington State but also British Colombia. No doubt there are many other examples you can suggest.
And of course an emphasis on categorization by one characteristic will come up with different groupings than categorizing by some other characteristic. Hence, traditional historical-political regions may not coincide with current federal regional offices or federal judicial circuits, or census offices, time zone divisions, agricultural areas, etc. These and many more are briefly discussed at the list of Regions of the U.S. entry in Wikipedia, which seems to be undergoing relatively active reorganization.
Lest I be accused of Wikipedia bias, Google and the Open Directory Project both have their own listings for U.S. Regions too.
As usual, I am starting with with the U.S. Census Bureau categories... but then modifying since I can subdivide further, and some of their groupings just seemed wrong (especially for the Southeast).
My biggest regret is not being able to properly include Appalachia, which includes sections of different states, but subdivides the states it does include. The closest is the grouping of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, under the truly awful term of "South West Mid Atlantic."
No doubt you all will have suggestions for better categories of regional grouping of states. ;)
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Caveats:
Of course these polls are not "scientific." Since the poll is inherently self selecting and is not a random sample there is always the possibility for selection bias bias including but not limited to responder bias, making the survey results different than truth. These will never be valid random sample. And just size alone does not make it valid since still self selecting and has inherent selection bias. But probably has some validity, though since not a random sample, and don't know enough about total population, sample frame and self selecting factors, cannot even measure how inaccurate it is. Yet probably has some validity... yet not valid and can't even measure how invalid... yet.... Granting all that, there are some indicators suggestive of possible validity in these polls: for example if distriubtion is relatively stable and does not jump around wildly this is not definititive but suggestive (at least that it is not being "freeped". Also, when poll done repeatedly, either same way, or only slightly different way (some advantage to doing slightly differently, if thought out, as test of validity), at different times, lets say different day of week, weekday and weekend, morning vs. night, months or years apart.
Some folks asked why should we do these demographic polls at all, and raised the issue of privacy concerns. As to the why question, the simple answer is "know thyself." Who are we when we spout off and comment? Also, it can be fun. It also helps the discussion of whatever the topic is, in this case, "America by Regions." And yes, maybe it will be reported by other media or be used to market advertising to the site. As to the privacy concerns, Kos has certainly made clear his strong views against "outing" the real identities of anybody. I do not know what access the site administrators have to the data or linkages of usernames to poll responses. Myself, I am just a regular user, and have nothing to do with administration or behind the scenes here. I don't know who has voted or what age goes with whom. All I have is the same bar graph and diary that is publicly visible. Also, there are no cross-tabs between any variables (e.g., prior urban-rural with this week's regional). It is not like a questionnaire with multiple separate questions per single interviewee. I guess the question is a matter of what the site administrators COULD access and link or identify if they were so inclined, whether they WOULD do so; and what protections are there on system to prevent an outsider from doing so? Clearly if there were a serious break of confidentiality/privacy, the Kos community would react very badly. The simple answer is, if you are that concerned, with this or any other issue, then do not participate; don't vote. This is a voluntary poll, within one of many diaries, among the nearly infinite number of webpages you can browse.
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Some Regionalism Issues in Politics
- Should the Democrats not really try to win back the South as Tom Schaller suggest in his book "Whistling Past Dixie"? Or is Webb's narrow victory in Virginia and Ford's close loss in Tennessee indicative of a possible new new south where Democrats and a 50 State strategy, can win, while still being true to a party values?
- are the Republicans doomed to be just the party of the old south and bible belts everywhere? Or does their continuing to hold seats elsewhere make this talk too hopeful?
- can the Democrats continue to make gains in the West North Central and Mountain West (see poll categories below)?
- ultimately how much of this is truly a matter of regionalism; or is it more of an urban-rural divide; or it it something else; or really many different factors?
- what else is there to be said about regional differences or similarities?
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Update: About those stupid regional groupings and stupider names: My intent/purpose was more about comparing how our community distribtion compares to the U.S. population, and less about making perfectly define regions. SO... I went for maximum granularity, using all 15 categories. For that purpose, the way I did it works okay. However, I agree completely that some choices of which states to lump together could be done differently. I certainly am open to having my choices criticized, especially if done in a way includes alternative, thought, and that leads to discussion (my state should really go together with this state and not state, because we share yada yada.).
One example: Alaska and Hawaii were seperate last time, since they are so unique. But I wanted to add room for non-US this time, and the numbers for those two states even combined were small. So I combined. Also, since both are outside continental U.S., entered last and together, are in some sense both little islands reachable by plane (many villages in Alaska are like little islands), have significant native population... actually there are some similarities. Obviously not in terms of Oil industry or their Repug/Dem tendencies. But again real point is more about our percent distribution being similar (or not) to U.S.
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Last Week's Race & Ethnicity Poll: Last week's repeat of the prior Race/Ethnicity Poll suggests that maybe perhaps we are just a little bit more diverse then we were, with 78% Anglo (White Non-Hispanic/Latino) compared to the prior 82%; about 6.7% Black compared to 5.1% before; and 6.6% compared to 4.6% Hispanic/Latino; and 5.3% compared to 4.1% Asian.
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Mixing My Two Subjects:
Following yesterday's great news that almost twice as many American physicians support National Health Insurance (59%) as oppose it (32%), I thought that I would provide a provide an alphabetic list of State organizations supporting single payer universal health care coverage. Despite the "Physician" in the name of some of these organizations, they are open to all. You may wish to hook-up with the one nearest you:
AL Health Care for Everyone - Alabama HealthCareForEveryone@charter.net
CA Nurses Association: http://www.calnurses.org/
CA Physicians’ Alliance: http://capa.pnhp.org/
CA Health Care for All: http://www.healthcareforall.org/
CA One-Care-Now: http://www.onecarenow.org/...
CO Health Care for All: http://www.healthcareforallcolorado.org/
CT Coalition for Universal Health Care: http://cthealth.server101.com/
DE Informed Civic/Political Coalition: http://deinformedvoters.org/
FL PNHP: http://www.tbpnhp.org/
FL for Health Security: http://www.ffhs.org/
GA for a Common Sense Health Plan: http://www.commonsensehealthplan.org/
IL Health Care for All: http://www.healthcareforallillinois.org/
IN Hoosiers for Commonsense Health Plan: http://www.hchp.info/
KS Heartland Health Care for All http://healthcareforall.kumc.edu/
KY PNHP: http://www.kyhealthcare.org/
ME People's Alliance: http://www.mainepeoplesalliance.org/
MD Health Care for All Coaltion: http://www.mdsinglepayer.org
MA Campaign for Single Payer: http://www.masscare.org/
MA Affordable Health Insurance for Everyone: http://healthcareformass.org/
MA Alliance to Defend Health Care: http://www.massdefendhealthcare.org/
MI Universal Health Care Access Network: http://www.michuhcan.com/
MN Universal Health Care Coalition: http://www.muhcc.org/
MN Citizens Organized Acting Together: http://www.coact.org/
MO for Single Payer Healthcare: http://www.mosp.us/...
MS PNHP: http://www.pnhp-mo.org/
NH PNHP: http://www.granitestate-pnhp.org/
NY Metro Chapter of PNHP: http://www.pnhpnyc.org/
NY State Capital District PNHP: http://capitaldistrictpnhp.blogspot.com/
NC Committee to Defend Health Care: http://www.ncdefendhealthcare.org/
NC Healht Care for All North Carolina: http://www.HealthCareforAllNC.org/
OH Single-Payer Action Network: http://www.spanohio.org/
OH PNHP Ohio http://www.pnhpohio.org/
OH Health Care for All Ohio http://healthcareforallohio.org/
OR Health Care for All: http://www.healthcareforalloregon.org/
PA Philly Area Committee to Defend Health Care: http://www.phillyhealth.org/
PA http://phillyhealth.blogspot.com/
RI Everybody In-Nobody Out: http://www.everybodyinnobodyout.org/...
TX Health Care for All: http://www.healthcareforalltexas.org/
UT Health Alliance: http://www.utahhealthalliance.org/
VT Health Care for All: http://www.vthca.org/
WA Health Care for All: http://www.healthcareforallwa.org/
WA PNHP: http://www.pnhpwesternwashington.org/
WV Mountain State PNHP: http://mountainstatepnhp.com/
WI Coalition for Health: http://www.wisconsinhealth.org/
WY Voices Foundation: http://www.wyoming-voices.org/
For Single-Payer Actions in Your State:
http://www.pnhp.org/...
&
http://www.pnhp.org/...
More State Contacts:
http://www.healthcare-now.org/...
State-by-State Legislation in Process:
http://www.ncsl.org/...
Health and Health Care Facts in Your State:
http://www.statehealthfacts.org/
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Have at it :)