As I watch this year's quadrennial Republican Nation Convention the GOP is smart to remind me of their primary selling point. That party's biggest claim to fame after fiscal conservatism and manifest jingoism is the idea that most people are like them. They are "regular people", or as brownsox referenced in an earlier blog from today, "reg'lar." That missing "U" is no coincidence.
I searched around and found a website I've looked to in times of need. It is an example of one of my favorite uses of political polling graphics. It's a webpage credited to Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman from the University of Michigan. They show the familiar red-state/blue-state map of the election results and how there are only these tiny pockets of blue in a bleed chest wound of red. When you look at these results, it's easy to feel like maybe we angry left are an isolated few, that we are a minority who believe this country is being run poorly.
I think for a moment, maybe we don't have a right to lead?! So much of the people disagree with us! Maybe us liberals only invented democracy just to see ourselves voted out in the end. Maybe. (too far to claim the invention of democracy?)
Link is below.
These three guys show it how it actually is. That blue is darker than red almost every where there are actual people. But even then, these maps show that there are no red states, and there are no blue states, there are only the United States of America.
It's been popularly linked before, but just again to remind yourself, look at the 2004 Election Results.
The (contiguous 48) states of the country are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate (George W. Bush) or the Democratic candidate (John F. Kerry) respectively. The map gives the superficial impression that the "red states" dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones. However, as pointed out by many others, this is misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations, whereas most of the blue states have large ones. The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election.
We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage -- which has little to do with politics -- but to the number of their inhabitants[...]
and then it goes. It's dry but don't worry, there are pictures. And they tell a great story about how I don't have to feel about myself and become like Dennis Miller or, god forbid, Joe Lieberman
An interesting thing to note. Alaska, if shown for its population and not its size would go from being the biggest state to the third smallest. Much smaller than every metropolitan city. It's about the size of El Paso. It's about the number of people you represent when you're a U.S. Congressman.
So remember, you are not in the minority. You are the majority. Sounds funny, doesn't it? We are now the moral majority. Not them, not any more. we say enough.