Election tipped along the edges of metro areas

Barack Obama will become president on Jan. 20 not because he altered the electoral map, as he said he could uniquely do, but because he boosted the Democratic vote in swing-state suburbs, political scientist Michael Harrington writes on newgeography.com. His election "had to do with headway with specific voters – especially suburbanites and key swing states – rather than any overthrow of anticipated urban/rural voting divides," the site's editors write.

While Obama drive up black turnout, got two-thirds of the vote among other minorities and more than two-thirds of voters under 30, none of those shifts reflect "the electoral geography that drives the Electoral College results," Harrington writes. "The true shift from red to blue was actually driven by a slight shift at the margins of the divide. The tipping point was in the suburbs where middle and upper class suburbanites congregate and 49 percent of the electorate resides." The result, he says: Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida changed from red to blue.

To prove his point, Harrington uses these maps prepared by Mark Newman, showing the range of the partisan vote in a spectrum from red to blue, county-by-county (click below to enlarge):"Not a big difference, is there?" Harrington asks. The key differences, he writes, were on the edges of metropolitan areas: "Obama captured more suburban counties outside the urban core than either Gore or Kerry. These counties not only have lower population densities but also higher incomes and more white inhabitants. So much for race. . . . Obama won handily in the mature suburbs where Bush and Kerry had evenly split. This is also where much of the non-black minority support for Obama resides."

As for the rural vote, Harrington writes, "We again see a consistent monotonic relationship between party preference and population density. As we move outward from the urban core, voting preferences shift from blue to purple to red. This suggests that the urban-rural split in American politics is still very much with us. This should not surprise us if these political differences are based on lifestyle preferences that do not change from election to election or candidate to candidate." (Read more)