Keep in mind that some people disapprove of Bush because he isn't conservative enough.

The facists are angry at him.

Of course those maps overstate the Red due to population density.

Great post.  I wonder what his latest strongly disapprove number is?  Those are the numbers who aren't susceptible to charades like tonight's glorified campaign commercial "speech."

The strongly disapprove folks are gone forever.  Once it hits sixty I think he never again hits 40 or even 35 percent approval.

i like that map, maybe we'll see it on network tv in a few novembers.

regarding the 19% democratic advantage in a generic ballot , i would suggest a visit to the betting website tradesports.com .....the race is a toss-up there with the dems holding only a narrow lead......the site does not do well in predicting american idol outcomes but similiar sites did a fine job predicting outcome of last presidential race.......so take your time in booking your reservations to the 2009 inaugaration.....jsquaredone

There is no way that Lafayette Parish in south central Louisiana is blue. Believe me, I dearly wish that it were, but that's not what i see on the ground. The wingers here may no be all that happy with Bush right now, but they are not ready to embrace liberal ideology.

Nice maps, but Montana is still better than NYC. Oh yeah, and nice and Democratic too...

Let's hope the DLC asshole adulterer doesn't win the primary -- Montana wants to go populist blue.

just curious.

Be careful, Kerry was up and so was Michael Dukakis and once the GOP had their convention the GOP got ahead.  When the out party is out of power and they go first, they always have to come from behind to get the presidency, because the in party always have the advantage of going last.  So, once the debates start, we have to come from behind.

I wrote a piece almost two years ago that got to the origins of this binary red/blue thing --

It all started on Oct. 22, 2000 on NBC's now-defunct show "Sunday Today," when co-host Jodi Applegate said to her colleague Tim Russert:

   "Let's take a look at the electoral map, which, ultimately, I guess, is more important than the popular vote. And it's incredibly evenly split. You see the states favoring Bush are in red, the states for Gore are in blue. There are fewer of them, but they tend to be the more populous states."

This is the first reference to what has now become the most popular and pervasive political frame of analysis in national politics. It caught on fast. Three days later, on MSNBC's Equal Time, Oliver North (of Iran-Contra fame) pulled out his own red/blue map to prove to former Clinton aide Paul Begala, that Ralph Nader posed a real threat to Al Gore:

   North: "Let me just look at the map of what your guy's real problem is. If you look at this map, this electoral scoreboard if you will, you've got in red the states that are going to go for Governor George W. Bush. You've got in blue the states that are going for your pal Al.

   "But those states that are showing white in that map are the states that are the tossups, if you will, the battleground states.... The bad news is that Ralph Nader - and Nader's Raiders - in the Green Party are pulling big votes from your buddy Al...."

Ollie was right about the bad news, but setting that aside, the terms he uses - electoral scoreboard, battleground states, red, blue - are now mainstays of our contemporary political vocabulary.

I wouldn't trust the Missouri numbers just yet.  The Show Me State went from 36-61 to 29-68 in one month.

I like these 3-D maps that represent each county's population by height.  This one puts the Bush and Kerry counties together in one map, and you can see the contrast: red covers a lot of ground but stays low, blue is limited to small areas but towers way above the red field.

These maps still distort, because counties of different size have bars with cross sections proportional to their land area, so the same county would appear to have a different volume depending on its land area, even if it had the same height.  Height is the variable they're actually using, but when we look at 3-D shapes, volume is what we intuitively see.

Still, the distortion is much lass than the usual red-blue maps, and the advantage is that unlike with cartograms, these maps visually demonstrate the contrast between sparsely populated red and densely populated blue in a way that gets through intuitively.

There won't be any when people in UT, WY, and ID get around to figuring out that Bush suspects them of being terrorists and is gathering phone records on them.

I captured some maps prepared after the 2004 election that were colored to reflect mixtures of voters (shades of purple) or skewed to reflect population.  And there are some funny ones.
http://makethemaccountable.com/misc/Maps .htm

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

I don't know.  If the county maps are correct, wouldn't Idaho be blue and Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska be red in the state maps?  

Every county in Idaho is showing blue except for a few sparsely populated ones in the southeast corner of the state, but the state as a whole is red...I'd double check the numbers for those four states.

That county in southwestern Nevada that is showing red, if I recall is the county with Tonopah in it and is a swing county that often goes Dem.  Somehow I can't see them being deep red right now either.

Are the county maps accurate or just guesstimates?

Polls at this point of an election year are not what matters.Its votes on election day,lets hope that Dumbya's numbers are still in the toilet in November.

The county by county map vindicates the longterm growth approach taken by Howard Dean to build the Democratic infrastructure for a fifty state battle in the future.

Bush approval is NOT going to get much better in the next two years--- particularly after the Plame trials next year and the sight of Fitzgerald probing Cheney under oath.

Could you post the link to the county-by-county data? I'd like to do the purple-shaded cartogram of the county-by-county map...

White Voters in a Blue Nation:

I've been taking a look at the May results from Survey USA on Bush's approval ratings.

I thought it would be fascinating to look at how 'white' voters feel about the president, after all they are his base - he never bothers about black voters or hispanics.

And here are the states where he gets a positive approval rating from white voters:

Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Texas.

These nine states are the only ones where white voters give Bush a positive approval rating.

The states fall into two groups - the deep south and cowboy land.

I have no real comment to make, the results speak for themselves and paint a deeply disturbing picture for Bush, his Republican friends and their scare tactics.

Details:

http://www.surveyusa.com/...

Malcolm from over the Pond

Texas????

It truly boggles the mind. This is just anecdotal, but I spent a week in one of those still red spots in northern Florida during the Christmas vacation. The folks I ran into were all talking about how much they hated Bush.

I wonder how this would look if the map was based on approval ratings for Congress? I.e., black if approval rating over (50%? 40%?), white otherwise.

Mendoza Line

Below 50% in Nebraska is Bush's Mendoza Line.

phat

I prefer the "BUSH APPROVAL MAP" located at http://www.radicalruss.net/bushmap-anima ted.html

The April Bush approval Map is located at http://www.radicalruss.net/bushmap-20060 4.html.

Check them out.  They will REALLY make you feel optimistic.  

(This being said, I am really worried about the Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia e-voting machines that we will all vote on in November.  This may all be a wasted exercize if the e-voting machines work as the GOP intends.)

Zel

There are two things that continue to make me sick to my stomach about all this. They are that while we are rejoicing in the appropriately low poll ratings for the Abomination, and appropriately high ratings for the generic Dem, we are neglecting two very important points: 1. the Abomination is not running, and 2. polls still show that when asked if they would vote to reelect their Congressman or Senators the majority say yes. Since the majority of incumbent Congressman and Senators are Republicans, the people are actually stating that they want Republicans to maintain control. (I will now vomit).

Greetings from Idaho. Please don't kill me! Even here, only a bare majority still approve of the chimp.

That said, I am deeply suspicious about the county map that shows many Idaho counties are now blue. Of our 44 counties, I'd guess perhaps six have a chance of scoring Dem majority votes this fall. It helps that these include some of the more populous counties, but still ...

We do have a great Congressional race going on for the ID-1 open seat. Next week, we'll learn the winner of the six-way GOP primary. The candidates range from the Club for Growth-backed Bill Sali (Alan Keyes is coming to do a final rally for him this weekend) to anti-immigration firebrand Robert Vasquez. The most moderate of the bunch, Sheila Sorensen, would still be a rubber stamp for Bush. So it's looking better all the time for Dem candidate Larry Grant, a former business exec who helped build Idaho's largest private company, chip maker Micron.

I'm managing Larry's blog: Check us out at http://www.grassrootsforgrant.com.

Hey, cool article. I wrote a quick blog about it on my site, where I talk about why this isn't actually  reason for Dems to jump for joy. Would appreciate your comments.. www.themodernromantic.com

Clearly mapping voting statistics is necessary for plotting electoral strategies; and in that context these maps are great tools, particularly when we look at maps representing population rather than acreage (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/elec tion/).

However when "Thinking Blue" becomes the rhetoric beyond voting statistics, I question the value of this Blue strategy. The rhetoric of the opposition (see Greenwald Escalating the Rhetoric) casts a drama of traitors, un-American, editionist creeps even pro-terrorists. Such language is clearly divisive, hostile and in search of an enemy.

Feeling Blue is just as divisive. Embracing and wearing an identity of "Buying Blue" "Acting Blue"  "Being Blue," is divisive as well.

Meaning that the rhetoric of embracing blue is creates an enemy; though self-identifying rather than identifying other. But in creating an "Us", we must therefore create a "Them." Is that where we want to live?

What would the purple strategy look like?

What would rhetoric of finding shared values look like?

Let's look into it.

It be bluer if you used a cartogram.