Regionalism in politics

Important distinctions that rarely get media coverage. [Link]

For those interested in American politics, the national media provide all the information they could want, in the form of live reports from the campaign headquarters and campaign buses of candidates, constant updates of polling numbers, interviews with voters alone and in groups, clips of speeches, animated maps of states and counties and congressional districts — everything except the one thing that would make sense of it all: regional political geography.

The importance of geography in American politics could not be clearer. To begin with, there is the red state-blue state map, showing Republican-leaning states in the form of an L uniting the West and South and Democratic-leaning states clustered in the Northeast, around the Great Lakes and on the West Coast. From election to election, states shift from one color category to another, but the pattern remains remarkably stable.

Within parties, geography is just as important. In the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney’s base is the Northeast and parts of the West. Rick Santorum does best in the Midwest, Newt in the South.

Geography was just as important in the Democratic primaries during the contested presidential nomination race of 2008. After John Edwards dropped out of the race, Hillary Clinton did well in Greater Appalachia while Barack Obama racked up votes in the Plains states.

Nor is the centrality of region in American politics new. Regional differences not only date back to the beginning of the nation but almost destroyed it during the Civil War. Unfortunately for politics as an exciting spectator sport, large parts of the country tend to vote for one of the two major parties for decades or generations, a fact that limits the horse races to a few swing states in any given era. (See “Florida, 2000 Recount in.”)

Given the importance of geography in our politics, you’d expect political reporters and other commentators to be explaining why different regions vote in different ways. Unfortunately, you can watch many successive 24-hour cycles of political news coverage without getting any adequate analysis of political regionalism.

It’s not that America’s political commentators lack interest in demographic factors that influence politics. On the contrary, they are obsessed with a small number of demographic characteristics, chiefly race and sex. Viewers or readers are told endlessly about the gender gap and racial/ethnic differences in voting. But you would fall asleep waiting in vain for a political reporter on TV to explain differences between the Highland South and the coastal South or to describe the distinctive political culture of the states in the Midwest settled by New Englanders.

In the world of our political media, there are generic whites, generic Latinos and generic African-Americans from coast to coast. The categories are sometimes refined by class, but this still produces hopelessly vague descriptions — treating Italian-Americans in Rhode Island as though they are part of the same generic “white working class” to which many Scots-Irish Tennesseans and Norwegian-American North Dakotans also belong. These fuzzy definitions all too often harden into cartoonish stereotypes like the “Angry White Male” of a few decades ago or “NASCAR Man” more recently.