Here's an interesting set of maps for your perusal.

Here's the country divided up into counties. I believe you can click on this map to blow it up a bit to check it out in detail.

Four years ago I showed a similar map to a liberal friend of mine and his jaw dropped when I pointed out that geographically the country was a lot more conservative than he thought it would be. This country is run by a very small geographic core.

A quick glance tells me there are three states that have no blue counties in it whatsoever. None. There may be anothe one or two but I didn't look too carefully.

This is battleground Ohio, a fought over state. Geographically red, but the popular vote went blue.

This is the liberal state of New York. In this context it is not as liberal as one would think.

Here's my home state of Pennsylvania. Notice that the only blue areas are Harrisburg, the Philly/Scranton area, Erie and Pittsburgh. The rest of the state is red.


The ones for New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio are new for sure. The one of the entire United States is from someone that emailed it to me. I have compared it to another one in a different format and it looked fairly accurate, although it may possibly be a leftover from '08 whe Obama won the first time. Either way the results are pretty close.



This is a county breakdown of the recent election.



What is interesting is that the heartland is politically conservative and likely with good reason.



These are the people that generally can take care of themselves and don't really need a whole lot of government assistance the same way their citified counterparts seem to.



There are an awful lot of rural types out there that tend to be looked down on by their urban counterparts and when you think about it the urbanites are more often than not talking with their mouths full because many of these guys are the people that feed this nation and as of late provide the ingredients of the ethanol the urbaniites use to get back and forth to work.



It takes an awful lot of know how to run a farm and a lot of the know how doesn't come from a college classroom. There is something to be said for that.



Granted there are not as many family owned farms as there used to be, they are still out there living on the edge and making things happen and it really wouldn't surprise me to hear that many, many of them feel disenfranchised because they generally don't get back as much back for what they pay in taxes because a lot of their tax money goes to pay for the stuff the urbanites need.



These are the people, many of whom have no paved roads, storm drains, street lights, trash pickup or other services that cough up either on a state or federal level to have their money given to the cities so they can enjoy these services and more.



What is going on in America is that the country is being run by a few urban areas.



If you find a predominantly red state with a spot or two of blue in it, it is very likely that the blue areas are in the metropolitan area of the state, say the capitol city or some other large populated area.



I have included a map of New York to as a classic example. Not all of New York state is urban. There are quite a few rural areas there and a trip through it I took a while ago tells me that there is a lot of agriculture there including wineries, as parts of New York are suitable for growing good grapes.



You can tell by looking at the map of New York where the rural areas are simply because they are red.



One of the things that most likely irks the rural part of the population is that they are annoyed to say the least with seeing their tax dollars go to take care of people that should be taking care of themselves.



I have been through an awful lot of rural Ohio over the past several years and there have been times I have gone to Camp Perry through the back roads instead of just hauling ass across the Ohio turnpike and I sort of like what I see. These are the people that have the basic simple American values and respect hard work, go to whatever church they belong to and still take their hats off as the flag goes by.



There are quite a few chunks of the smaller highways named after their hometown boys that went off to war and never came back. You see the signs. They read something like HM3 Jeremy 'Doc' Huddston Highway or Sp/4 Dan Lewis highway. You don't see this as much when you near a city where they don't seem to care.

You also see fewer enlistees in the Free Stuff Army in these rural areas. Sure, there are some, but nowhere as many as in the urban areas because these people generally have a have a better work ethic.



These are also the people that send their kids to school to learn and not because they want the school to be baby sitters. They are probably more likely to get better educations there because the school system is there to teach the students and discipline is likely a bit stricter because they are smart enough to know that if a student isn't there to learn they often toss him out.



Geographically this country is pretty conservative but it seems to be run by an awful lot of urbanites and suburbanites that don't have a clue about who provides their daily bread, yet an awful lot of citified snobs look down on the hand that feeds them.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/