Election Sectionalism

Food for Thought
So, I'm reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln by David Herbert Donald) and I flipped to a map of the states preceding the Civil War. I thought it looked eerily similar to a recent map I saw online of states preceding the Tuesday election.

I'm not going to draw correlations between the two maps. You could easily spin the argument in either direction, even over a single issue, like healthcare. The political issues dividing the nation in 1860 are bad memories and foregone conclusions to us in 2012. The political issues dividing us today would be largely incomprehensible to the Americans of 1860. An attempt to draw a line from one set of issues to the other would be sloppy scholarship. And stupid.

I'm also not trying to draw conclusions about the results of the 1860 elections that could be applied today. Again, completely different political climates. Anything said to the contrary would be tantamount to paranoia.

What I find interesting is how the polarization resulting from a two party system (why anyone thought that was a good idea baffles me) falls roughly along the same geographic lines that it did over 150 years ago. How, in a time when technology has connected the world in a manner unprecedented in human history, our political beliefs are still determined largely by our zip code.

US Map 1863

Public Domain

US Election Results 2008

Public Domain

Note:

The modern two party system we have today, Republicans vs Democrats, was born in that 1860 election. From the 1870s into the 1920s, politics fell along the same geographical lines, only with the Northern States going to the Republicans and the Southern States going to the Democrats. After the Great Depression, politics vacillated wildly. For the most part, and I'm making generalizations here about electoral college results, during the 30s and 40s the maps look almost all blue. During the 50s, the Eisenhower years, the maps reverted back to the pre-depression divisions, blue in the South, red in the North. Kennedy's election results are all over the map. Johnson's map is all blue. The Nixon elections are all red. The Carter election has an East/West split, the West going Republican and the East going Democrat. The Reagan/Bush maps are almost all red. It's not until the first Clinton election that you see the modern blue North/red South election results that we get today.