Elections

Puerto Ricans Appear to Endorse Statehood in Referendum

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Lost in the extensive coverage of the 2012 U.S. Election is the recurrent and important issue of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the U.S. On Tuesday, the Puerto Rican electorate appeared to endorse statehood in a two-part non-binding referendum. Fifty-four percent of voters prefer changing Puerto Rico’s status from the status quo, and 61 percent of voters supported statehood. “Sovereign free association” garnered 33 percent of the vote, and independence only five percent. Puerto Rico is currently an unincorporated organized territory of the U.S. with “commonwealth” standing, a status that brings with it a complicated set of rights and privileges.

The two-part nature of the referendum question means that the results may not be the ringing endorsement of statehood that backers of the proposal had hoped. Of the 54 percent favoring a change in status, many could have desired either independence or sovereign free association. Likewise, of the 61 percent of voters statehood as opposed to independence or sovereign free association, many might actually want to retain the status quo. . Overall, the results seem to be compatible with previous statehood referendums and likely do not reflect any profound change in public opinion.

The 2012 Puerto Rican status referendum’s wording has come under harsh criticism, even from supporters of statehood. Pedro Rosselló, the former Governor of Puerto Rico and a longtime backer of statehood, feels that the referendum’s wording will cause “an indefinition that, in the end, will bring more of the same: the continuous status quo.” Nevertheless, most pro-statehood politicians appear to accept the results.

The next move belongs to the U.S. government, though it remains unclear when that move will occur and what form it will take. If Tuesday’s referendum is taken as an endorsement of statehood, Congress will need to decide on whether to admit Puerto Rico as a state. President Barack Obama, as well as leaders of both political parties, have promised to support Puerto Rico’s self-determination, though with the results of the two-part referendum open to interpretation, it is not certain what either the President or Congress will do.

Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuna, a backer of statehood, supports both the referendum and the pro-statehood interpretation of its results. He has promised to hold a constitutional assembly in 2014 followed by plebiscite, the necessary next-steps for statehood. Unfortunately for statehood-proponents, Fortuna lost his bid for reelection to Alejandro Garcia Padilla, who favors the status quo.

Even if the current referendum goes nowhere, a firmer resolution to the question of Puerto Rico’s status appears likely within the few years. The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization has asked several times since 2006 for the U.S. to “allow Puerto Ricans to fully exercise their inalienable right to self-determination and independence”. The U.S. government agrees, and has responded with a flurry of reports and investigations over the last few years. The report (pdf) published by the President’s 2011 Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Status argued for a two-stage referendum by which voters would first decide whether to remain part of the U.S., either as a state or remaining as a dependency. Then, if the independence option is turned down, a second vote would have the electorate chose between statehood and the status quo. Most likely a clear referendum like this one will be necessary for the U.S. government to act.

Preliminary Observations on the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

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Several pundits have claimed that the second major victor in yesterday’s U.S. presidential election was statistician Nate Silver, who correctly picked the winner in every state, thereby seemingly demonstrating the power of Bayesian analysis—when done correctly. In scrutinizing Silver’s final pre-election map, I can find only a few minor instances in which was not fully on-target (Iowa, for example, was not as close as he had depicted it). In a Slate column, however, Daniel Engber claims that the real credit should go to the pollsters who generated the date that Silver used. Engber notes that Silver, unlike most pollsters, missed the Democratic victory in the Montana senatorial contest.

The New York Times website features some excellent cartographic work on the election. One innovative map shows the shift in voting patterns from the 2008 election at the country level. As can be clearly seen, in the majority of U.S. counties, Mitt Romney gained a larger share of the vote than Republican candidate John McCain had received in the previous election. The exceptions to this pattern are intriguing. Across much of the Deep South, overall a Republican stronghold, Barack Obama gained votes in 2012 over his 2008 showing. Many of these “blue-shifted” counties are heavily African-American, which may indicate a greater voter turnout among Blacks in this election; if this is indeed the case, such a change runs counter to most of the predictions made prior to this election. An alternative thesis is that a considerable number of evangelical Whites in these counties declined to vote, not wanting to endorse a Mormon candidate. Yet in most other parts of the country dominated by conservative Protestants, Romney outpolled McCain. Other areas that moved in the Democratic direction include much of New Jersey and New York, which may in part reflect the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Central Ohio, perhaps the most crucial battleground area in this election, also shows a distinct shift in the direction of the Democratic Party.

At the state level, the map of the 2012 election looks very much like that of 2008, with only Indiana and North Carolina switching back to the Republican candidate (provided that Florida stays within the Obama camp). More significant is the fact that this map is also strikingly similar the maps of the 2004 and 2000 elections. The only state-level difference between yesterday’s election and that of 2000 was the movement of a few closely contested swing states from the Republican to the Democratic candidate: Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire. I suspect that migration patterns are pushing a few of these states, especially Colorado and Virginia, into the Democratic camp. But otherwise, the basic electoral geography of the U.S. has shown little change over the past twelve years. Even at the county level, the differences are relatively modest. The coal-mining region of Appalachian has definitely turned to the Republicans Party over this period, as have a number of counties located elsewhere in the Upper South. At the same time, the Democratic Party has solidified its advantage in the coastal West and in the Northeast. In 2000, George W. Bush took thirteen coastal counties on the West, whereas in 2012, Romney won only six. And whereas Bush was the victor in fifteen counties in northern New England, in this election Romney took only four.

Although the geographical changes in U.S. presidential voting since 2000 have been minor, the situation is quite different if we look back to the 1996 election, as well as those preceding it. In 1996, Bill Clinton took the interior states of the Upper South as well as Louisiana. In the early twenty-first century, it would be highly unlikely that such states as Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas would vote for a Democratic presidential candidate. In yesterday’s election, Obama received less than 40 percent of the vote in all three states, and in West Virginia, which was recently a Democratic stronghold, he barely got 35 percent. Obama did significantly better in such Deep South states as South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, where the African-American population is much larger.

Only two states gave more than 70 percent of their votes to one candidate: Utah, where Romney got roughly 73 percent, and Hawaii, which went for Obama by 70.6 percent. Although the overall trend in U.S. politics is clearly one of increasing regional differentiation, most states are still more “purple” than “red” or “blue.” At the county level, however, it is a different story, as many localities in the Great Plains and the Inter-Mountain West went for Romney by well over 80 percent. In contrast, it is difficult to find any county that gave more than 80 percent of its votes to Obama. Holmes County in Mississippi, however, did go for Obama by 83.9 percent. Holmes County, not surprisingly, is mostly African-American, with only 20 percent of its population classified as White.

Local Elections Conclude in Bosnia and Herzegonvina

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Preliminary results are in for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 7th local elections. The elections went smoothly and without irregularities, but many fear that the results may fan the flames of ethno-nationalism and separatism in the fragile country’s political discourse. The big winner appears to be the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), which won 27 mayoral seats for a gain of 13 from the last such elections in 2008. The SDS’s gains come within Republika Srpska, one of two mostly independent political entities that together comprise Bosnia and Herzegovina (see map at right). Ethnic Serbs dominate Republika Srpska, whereas about three quarters of the inhabitants of its confusingly named counterpart—the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina—are Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnian Croats.

The success of the SDS has understandably raised eyebrows. SDS members played a leading role in the initiation of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War, and have since been found guilty of numerous crimes against humanity in international courts related the indiscriminate killing of Bosniaks during the war. The SDS does not currently espouse violence, but it has positioned itself to the right of the relatively moderate Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD)—the party of Republika Srpska’s president, Milorad Dodik. The SNSD was the main loser in October 7th’s elections, losing 26 mayoral positions.

Local elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina are more closely associated with national politics than in most other countries. According to Bosnian political analysts, local issues like roads and schools were mostly ignored, as candidates tended to emphasize questions of sovereignty, such as whether and how Bosnia should be divided. According to university lecturer Dražen Pehar, the local media share some of the blame, as they “simply followed the election agenda as imposed by the parties and the candidates, rather than trying to steer it towards a proper set of issues.”

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s sharp ethnic and political division means that the country essentially experienced two different elections, one in Republika Srpska and another in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the latter, the political landscape will remain relatively stable, with the dominant Bosniak party, the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), winning 34 mayoral seats. The Croat Democratic Union, which represents the Federation’s Croat minority, won 14 seats.

The final results of the elections remain unclear in some municipalities, most notably Srebrenica. The then-majority Bosniak Srebrenica was the scene of a notorious mass-killing in 1995, where over 8,000 Bosniaks died at the hands of Republika Srpska troops and paramilitary organizations. The killings, along with the expulsion of 25,000-30,000 other Bosniaks, were ruled a genocide by The Hague in 2004. Since the end of the war, about 10,000 Bosniaks have returned to Srebrenica, where they now constitute a one-third minority. In the past, former Bosniak residents of Srebrenica driven from the city in the 1990s have been allowed to vote in local elections, electing Bosniak mayors and councilors. Beginning with the October 7th elections, that privilege no longer applied, prompting fears that Serb politicians will take power.

Serbs see the expiration of special voting rights for Bosniak ex-Srebrenica residents as a natural step towards normalcy. Their reasoning is that local elections require local expertise among voters. According to Srebrenica’s Serb SNSD mayoral candidate, Vesna Kocevic, “the citizens who live here should decide about Srebrenica and about what happens in the community.” SNSD politicians also tend to minimize the hardships of Srebrenica’s Bosniaks; Republika Srpska’s president recently claimed at a Srebrenica campaign event that “there was no genocide.”

Srebrenica’s Bosniak mayoral candidate, Camil Durakovic, sees the new political situation as a fulfillment of exactly what the perpetrators of the 1995 killings wanted. Srebrenica’s Bosniaks have responded by encouraging Bosniaks from around the country to register and vote in Srebrenica. The outcome of their efforts is not yet clear, but it appears that the election will be close. Republika Srpska may challenge the results.

In a more humorous yet perhaps ominous turn, a mayoral candidate in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s fourth-largest city—the majority Bosniak Zenica—was banned from the election in September for uploading pornographic videos to his official campaign website. According to the Boston Globe, mayoral candidate Mirad Hadziahmetovic  “said he uploaded porn clips after realizing that large numbers of people use the Web to peruse sexual content.”

Thai Transsexual Wins Election

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Yonlada Suanyos, a transsexual woman, recently gained fame by becoming Thailand’s first katoey (or openly transgender person) to be elected to public office. Ms. Suanyos, a PhD candidate who also runs a television station and a jewelry business, will soon become a councilor in Nan province in northern Thailand. She was formerly a member of a transgender music group called Venus Flytrap, performing under the name of Posh Venus.

Thailand is noted for both the size and the public acceptance of its transgender community. According to a Global Post article, roughly one biological man in 2,500 live as women in the United States, whereas in Thailand the figure could be as high as one in 165. Not surprisingly, Thailand is a major center of sexual reassignment surgery. Thai transsexuals often suffer abuse, but less so than in most other countries. They are periodically celebrated in beauty contests, and last year, according to Reuters, “A new Thai airline [began] hiring transsexual ladyboys as flight attendants, aiming at a unique identity to set itself apart from competitors as it sets out for the skies.”

Military service can be a difficult matter for transsexuals in Thailand, a country that practices conscription. As the Global Post article recounts:

 In practice, long-haired, perfumed draftees with hormone-induced breasts are very rarely drafted. Instead, they are dismissed as unfit for service, often for having “malformed chests.” The most common reason for dismissal, however, is also the more damning: “mental disorder.” Worse yet is “permanent insanity,” a ruling written into the permanent record of kathoey Samart Meecharoen in 2006.

The Thai Buddhist establishment is also concerned about the prevalence of transsexuals in the country. Some monasteries even provide “masculinity training,” a difficult and highly controversial practice. Reportedly, half of the young men trained in one program have gone on to live as women.

 

The Urban/Rural Divide in Slovenia’s Recent Election

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Several recent GeoNotes have emphasized the urban/rural divide in U.S. Republican presidential primary elections. The same pattern is evident elsewhere, and is illustrated in a particularly striking manner in the recent Slovenian Family Code Referendum. The new family law code, which had been passed by the Slovenian Parliament, extended the rights of same-sex couples and prohibited the corporal punishment of children. A conservative group called “Civil Initiative for the Family and the Rights of Children” opposed the law and collected enough signatures to force a referendum. In the resulting contest, the code was defeated, with 55 per cent of voters rejecting it.

The geographical patterns in the vote are clear. The new code was supported in almost all urban areas, and opposed in almost all rural districts. On the Electoral Geography 2.0 map posted here, I have added Slovenian’s largest cities to highlight the urban/rural divide. As can be seen, support for the measure was especially pronounced in Ljubljana, the capital city.  The only other tendency of note is the fact that voters along the southwestern border, an area heavily influenced by Italian culture, tended to support the measure more than those elsewhere in the country.

Geographical Patterns in the Louisiana Republican Primary

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The map of the Louisiana Republican presidential primary supplied by the Huffington Post last week revealed little of interest: Mitt Romney won Orleans Parish (encompassing New Orleans) decisively, and Rick Santorum took every other part of the state. A modified version of the map that shows Santorum’s margin of victory, however, reveals several other patterns. As can be seen, Santorum did not do quite as well in urban parishes as he did in rural ones, at least in the southern half of the state. His margin of victory was also somewhat lower than average in the rural parishes bordering the Mississippi River in the eastern part of the state.

As many commentators have noted, Santorum, a Roman Catholic, has done particularly well in areas dominated by evangelical Protestants. In the North and Midwest, Santorum have received more support from voters in this group than from Roman Catholics. In Louisiana, little difference is apparent between these two groups within the Republican electorate. As can been seen on these maps, the state’s striking division between its mostly Catholic south and its largely Protestant north was not reflected in this primary contest.

In the past, Louisiana’s religious divide was sometimes visible in election returns. The pattern was clearly evident in the general election of 1960s, in which John Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, triumphed in the south but lost the north.

 

The Geography of the 2012 Illinois Republican Primary

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The geographical patterns in the recent Republican presidential primary in Illinois are quite clear. As can be seen by comparing the two maps, Mitt Romney triumphed in most urban and suburban parts of the state, doing particularly well in the Chicago metropolitan area, whereas Rick Santorum did very well in rural counties, particularly in the southeastern part of the state, an area with a somewhat southern cultural background. Exceptions to this pattern include Rock Island County in the northwest, Madison County in the center-west, and Tazewell County to the south of Peoria, which are all relatively urban or suburban, yet voted for Santorum.

The Political Contradictions of Anti-Urban NIMBY Activism in California

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This final entry on Northern California will conclude the series by elaborating on the previously stated thesis that the local drive to protect urban and inner suburban neighborhoods from development is self-contradictory. Although anti-development activists incline to the left, their land-use policies are actually conservative, undermining their own larger agenda. Earlier posts looked at environmental sustainability and class divergence, contending that NIMBY (“Not in My Backyard”) hostility to urbanization thwarts the transition to a lower-carbon economy and places extraordinary burdens on middle- and working-class people, especially young ones. This post will consider the effects of the movement on the broader political orientation of the United States. The argument, simply put, is that by obstructing development in urban cores of the Bay Area and other Democratic-voting metropolitan areas of the country, local preservationists push growth into more development-friendly parts of the country, which tend to be much more conservative. Such dynamics enhance the economic and political power of those places, and thus nudge the United States as a whole in a more conservative direction.

I must stress that such claims are intended to be politically neutral, in accordance with the non-ideological stance of GeoCurrents. I am not arguing, in other words, that enhancing the political power of right-leaning portions of the U.S. is bad, as this blog is concerned with empirical issues of “what is,” not with what ethical issues of “what ought to be.” Admittedly, several recent posts have violated this principle, openly advocating urban intensification. Neutrality is often difficult to maintain, and I let myself get carried away by personal concerns about climate change, economic stagnation, and the widening class divide in the U.S. The same posts do, however, rest on an empirical basis, outlining the contradictions between stated goals and the consequences of actions undertaken. It is a fact that most people in Palo Alto and similar communities want to reduce green-house gas emissions and lessen the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots”; it is also a fact—or so I hope to have demonstrated—that opposition to urban intensification in these same communities actually has the opposite effects. Such an argument should be assessable by readers of any political persuasion. One could, for example, regard global warming as a hoax, welcome suburban expansion along metropolitan outskirts, and celebrate the glowing class disparity in the U.S. and still accept the thesis.

By preventing development in urban and old-suburban areas of the San Francisco metropolitan area, local activists shunt it elsewhere. Previous posts emphasized the Bay Area’s own exurban fringe in the northern San Joaquin Valley, but growth is also pushed into other parts of the country. States that gain from this process, Texas most notably, tend to be much more conservative than California. Such dynamics are experienced across the country, enhancing population and economic growth in Republic-voting areas and discouraging it in Democratic-voting ones. Partly as a result, the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives is shifting toward the more conservative parts of the country. Other factors, of course, contribute to this process, but it is difficult to deny the paradoxical consequences of supposedly left-wing NIMBY activism.

A number of conservative writers in the U.S. have noted the same general process, delighting in the diverging fortunes of the country’s two most populous states, contrasting the economic health of Texas with California’s distress. A March 14 post in the National Review Online is typical of the genre. Here Chuck DeVore, former Republican member of the California State legislature, blames California’s fiscal crisis on its high tax rates, powerful unions, obstructing bureaucrats, environmental regulations, litigious legal system, and “subsidization of poverty.” As an example of the difficulty of doing business in California and the ease of conducting it in Texas, DeVore cites Apple’s decision to build a new $304 million campus in Austin rather than in the Bay Area (more recent reports, however, claim that the project may actually go to Arizona). California’s impending fiscal catastrophe, conservative writers like DeVore stress, will probably result in yet another round of tax increases, which will drive away more businesses and people, potentially sending the state into a downward spiral.

Such charges may have some merit. California’s tax rates are high and will probably increase, discouraging investors and wage earners alike. But overall, the Bay Area remains a very attractive place in which to live and to do business, as is reflected in its land values and rents, both commercial and residential. (The same situation holds in much of Southern California as well.) Silicon Valley is again booming; according to a recent report, “Office occupancy in the region rose by 2.7 million square feet last year, the most since 2000, and rents may advance 11 percent to an average $36 a square foot in 2012.” Many people want desperately to live in communities such as Palo Alto, otherwise they would not be willing to spend $800,000 for small condos in undistinguished buildings or $1,200,000 for modest, mass-constructed tract houses from the 1960s. The real drag on local business is not California’s somewhat excessive taxation rates or its slightly more powerful unions than those found elsewhere, but rather its outrageous land and housing costs and its exasperating obstacles to new urban developments. Apple currently wants to build a gargantuan 2.8 million square-feet corporate headquarters in Santa Clara County, which would dwarf its planned Texas project; gaining permission to do so will prove a challenge, to say the least. Apple’s proposed “space-ship” building can be criticized on both aesthetic and environmental grounds; encompassing 5.7 million square feet of landscaping, the behemoth would not be pedestrian-friendly. But the mere fact that that it is being pursued runs counter to the thesis that businesses and people are being driven out of California by the state’s left-wing policies.

Liberal and conservative commentators alike tend to by-pass NIMBY opposition to urban development when discussing California’s economic crisis. Right-wing writers prefer to focus on taxation, unionization, regulation, and the legal environment, as these issues allow them to score points in national-level debates. Left-wing writers are often reluctant to confront contradictions within their own political camp, and hence try to place all blame on their conservative opponents.

A March 17 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Seeking Growth Without Sprawl,” presents a perfect example of such liberal blinders on the urbanization issue. The article touts an “ambitious new regional plan” that would steer new developments towards existing cities and public transportation corridors, based on the new urban intensification paradigm. So far, so good. But when examining opposition to the plan, the article mentions only criticisms put forward by conservative activists. Some right-wingers have attacked the proposal for supposedly ignoring consumer desires, as “future workers and their families will want an environment of single family subdivisions.” That such an objection ignores market realities, supposedly the touchstone of contemporary conservatism, is not mentioned. The article goes on to highlight critics on the extreme right, those who view the entire urbanization scheme as part of a nefarious United Nations plot to extinguish American freedom and establish global governance.

Emphasizing such opposition is an easy course for the San Francisco Chronicle to take, as it fits well with the left-leaning proclivities of most of its readers. But it is also misleading. When actual plans for urbanization projects are put on the table, meaningful resistance comes not from the tiny cadre of U.N conspiracy theorists, but rather from superficially liberal activists who do not oppose urban intensification per se, but certainly do not want it impinging on their own communities. Pointing out such a contradiction could be editorially imprudent, potentially alienating an influential part of the newspaper’s readership. As a result, the real issues are left unmentioned.

 

Republican Primary Results by County

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Yesterday’s GeoNote examined the recent Republican presidential primary in Alabama, stressing the divergent results in the state’s various regions. In both Alabama and neighboring Mississippi, each of the top three candidates took a significant number of counties. As the first map posted today shows, this has been a somewhat unusual pattern in this election season; in most states that have selected delegates to the Republican convention, one or two candidates took almost all counties.

This map also reveals the strength of the libertarian candidate Ron Paul in certain parts of the country. Paul has done quite well in rural countries in the west and far northeast. Although he narrowly lost Maine to Mitt Romney, Paul took a majority of Maine’s counties, several by more than fifty per cent of the vote.  Western Washington and northern Idaho have also given strong support to the libertarian challenger. Paul’s relatively strong showing in Virginia, on the other hand, stemmed largely from the fact that only he and Romney were on the ballot. His support in eastern Iowa is more difficult to explain.

 

Geographical Patterns in the Alabama Primary Election

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The recent Republican presidential primary in Alabama reveals some interesting geographical patterns. As the first two maps indicate, the so-called Establishment candidate, Mitt Romney, did well in the wealthier and more urban parts of the state. The one major exception here was Madison County in the far north, home of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, located near Huntsville. Surprisingly, relatively cosmopolitan Madison Country voted for Rick Santorum, the most socially conservative candidate.

The less urban and affluent countries of the state gave the majority of their votes either to Santorum or to Newt Gingrich. Here the best correlation is with race; countries with high percentages of African-Americans tended to vote for Gingrich. The actual voters in these counties were almost all White, as very few Black residents belong to the Republican Party. It has been suggested that White voters in such areas responded particularly well to Gingrich’s fierce denunciations of food stamps and other governmental welfare programs.

Chechnya’s Questionable Votes—and Investments

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Returns from the recent elections in Russia indicate significant “irregularities” in the voting process. Nowhere was fraud more widespread than in Chechnya, which recorded a 99.6 percent voter turnout, and which Vladimir Putin took by 99.76 percent.

The Russian government has been pouring money into Chechnya in recent years —US$21 billion by some accounts. Many of these investments have been questionable. A recent report indicates that, “the swanky, 32-story-high Hotel Grozny City, with its three restaurants and five-star service, is pretty much always 90 percent empty.”

On the electoral map, note that Moscow was the only part of Russia to give less than half of its votes to Putin.

 

 

 

 

Rethinking California’s Political Divide

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California Liberal and Conservative Precincts Map by David Latterman

California Liberal and Conservative Precincts Map by David LattermanRecent GeoCurrents posts on Northern California have emphasized the political divide between the left-leaning coast and the right-leaning interior. Such an analysis is reinforced by an incisive new report, David Latterman’s “The California Political Precinct Index,” published by the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco. Based on returns from a number of California state ballot initiatives, Latterman has constructed a precinct-level map of political orientation, arrayed along an axis from the “most liberal” (in blue) to the “most conservative” (in red) areas. The map I have posted here overlays county-level data on Latterman’s precinct-based map, showing California’s ten most conservative and ten most liberal counties (as identified in the same report).

As can be seen, the gap between the northern coast and interior is profound; the northern half of California encompasses nine of the state’s ten most liberal counties and nine of its ten most conservative counties. From Big Sur on the central coast to southern Humboldt County in the far north, it is difficult to find conservative precincts within fifty miles of the ocean. Significantly, the wealthiest districts in the San Francisco Bay Area are depicted in blue. In southern California this pattern is not as pronounced. Although many rich areas of the southland—Malibu, Beverly Hills—are mapped as voting with the left, the tony Palos Verdes Peninsula is decidedly red.

The few liberal precincts in the conservative interior are instructive. In the San Joaquin Valley, the larger cities—Stockton, Modesto, and Fresno especially—are clearly marked blue. Other liberal San Joaquin precincts are linked to heavily Hispanic populations. In the more conservative Sacramento Valley, the college towns of Chico and Davis, along with the state capital of Sacramento, appear as liberal enclaves. Other left-leaning precincts in the interior are characterized by low population density and abundant natural amenities, which have attracted left-leaning outdoors enthusiasts. Examples include the Lake Tahoe area, Alpine County, eastern Mariposa County, and parts of Inyo County.

The most conservative portions of the state are also intriguing. In southern California, southwestern Riverside County is marked as quite far to the right; this area witnessed a major suburban housing boom just before the crash of 2008. Further north, a strip of western Kern County—the eleventh most conservative county in the state—is mapped in deep red. This area encompasses Midway-Sunset, the largest oilfield in California and the third largest in the United States. Some of the ranching areas in far northeastern California, especially in Lassen County, are shown as equally conservative.

Latterman’s geographical dissection of California’s left/right divide at the precinct level goes about as far as it can. More locally specific data is not available, and further analysis will eventually be frustrated by the limitations imposed by a simple, one-dimensional, left/right spectrum. Many political views do cluster along such an axis, but by no means all. Different regions are “liberal,” “conservative,” or “moderate” in very different ways. Mendocino and San Mateo counties may look the same on Latterman’s map, but they are not. Mendocino has proportionally many more radical leftists and left-libertarians—and many more people on the far right as well—than San Mateo County, a staid, well-off, pro-business, technologically oriented suburban expanse.

In some respects, moreover, the wealthy suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area are not as liberal as they seem from Latterman’s map or from the underlying data. This should perhaps come as no surprise; these same areas were reliably Republican voting as recently as the 1970s, and they contain many members of “the one percent.” Rich places historically incline to the right, as they still do in many parts of the United States. But because the general cultural tenor of the Bay Area is so strongly liberal, conservative viewpoints often remain hidden. Frequently they are not even recognized as such, in something of a mass case of political blindness. The people of Palo Alto and environs, the heart of Silicon Valley, view themselves as strongly environmentalist, deeply concerned about inequalities of wealth, and committed to the national triumph of the Democratic Party; in actuality, the policies pursued by their local governments are deeply anti-environmental, serve to exacerbate the gap between the rich and the poor, and help push the United States as a whole in a more conservative direction.

Substantiating these controversial if not outrageous claims will take up the next few posts, the final ones in the current series on northern California.

 

Egypt’s Electoral Geography Revealed

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Egyptian Block Vote Map from Electoral Politics 2.0

Egyptian Block Vote Map from Electoral Politics 2.0By Western standards, Cairo is a socially conservative and religiously devout metropolis. By Egyptian standards, however, it is a rather liberal place. Such a position is evident in the electoral maps of Egypt’s 2011 legislative election, recently put on-line by the invaluable website, Electoral Geography 2.0: Mapped Politics. As the first map posted here shows, the secular, center-left party, Egyptian Block, received a higher percentage of the vote in greater Cairo than elsewhere in the country. Egyptian Block also did relatively well in Alexandria, which was once considered a cosmopolitan city, and in the Assiout Governorate in the central Nile Valley, noted for having one of the largest concentrations of Coptic Christians in the country.  According to the Wikipedia, Egyptian Block, which received less than nine percent of the vote nationwide, hopes to:

“[E]stablish Egypt as a modern civil state in which science plays an important role, and to create equality and social justice in the country. The objectives of the Bloc also include to make a decent life possible for the poorer population, including education, health care and proper housing. It advocates a pluralistic, multiparty democracy and rejects religious, racial, and sexual discrimination.”

 Al_Nour Vote Map in Egypt from Electoral PoliticsAs the second map shows, the ultra-conservative Salafist party, Al-Nour, received relatively few votes in Cairo.  This party did very well, however, in the western desert, in the agricultural Fayoum Depression, and in large parts of the Nile Delta.

The 1980s Geopolitical Transformation of California

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California Presidential Election 1960 map from Dave Leip's Atlas

California Presidential Election 1960 map from Dave Leip's AtlasRecent GeoCurrents posts have examined the political allegiances of various parts of California, focusing on Mendocino County. Mendocino today votes strongly for Democratic Party candidates, although not overwhelmingly so, like San Francisco. Voting history places Mendocino squarely in the Democratic camp for many decades, as the county has turned to Republican candidates only in landslide years, such 1972, 1980, and 1984. But although Mendocino voted for Democratic presidential candidates in both the 1960s and today, it has done so for different reasons. In the 1980s, the political geography of California experienced a wholesale transformation, one in which most rural counties switched from Democratic to Republican voting behavior. Rural Mendocino and neighboring Humboldt and Lake counties, however, stayed in the Democratic camp. They did so largely because they had experienced their own demographic transformation in the same period. That change will be the subject of a later post; today’s examines the larger geographical transformation of California voting patterns during the 1980s.

To examine California’s electoral shift, let us begin in the hotly contested election of 1960, when Democrat John F. Kennedy edged out Republican Richard M. Nixon to become President of the United States. As the election map here shows—in Dave Leip’s* reverse color scheme—Kennedy’s support was concentrated in traditional Democratic strongholds: urban, industrial counties (San Francisco, Alameda, and Los Angeles); agricultural counties of the San Joaquin Valley; and rural counties in the north dominated by mining and forestry. Nixon took many of the state’s farming counties as well—the Sacramento Valley in particular tended to support Republican candidates—but his real strength was in prosperous suburban counties, such as Orange in the south and Marin and San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this election, Mendocino’s returns indicate its rural, working-class nature, as its economy was then dominated by logging, fishing, and small-scale farming.

After the Kennedy-Nixon contest, the U.S. experienced several aberrant elections: in particular, the Democratic landslide of 1964 and the Republican tidal wave of 1972. Both contests reveal hitherto hidden patterns. In the Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964, the only Republican-voting counties in the northern half of the state were Sutter in the agricultural Sacramento Valley and sparsely populated Inyo and Mono on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. In the Republican triumph of 1972, when the Democrats leaned further left than they ever had, only San Francisco, Alameda (which includes Oakland and Berkeley), Yolo (which includes the University of California at Davis), and three mostly rural counties in the north voted for George McGovern rather than Richard Nixon.

California Presidential Election 1976 Map from Dave Leip's AtlasIn 1976, voting patterns in California returned to roughly the same position that they had occupied in 1960. Democrat James Carter, an evangelical Christian from Georgia, was able to reestablish the aging New-Deal alliance, triumphing in urban cores, in roughly half of the agricultural counties, and in most of the mining, logging, and ranching areas of the north. Such a return to the older pattern, however, was temporary. In the next two elections, 1980 and 1984, Ronald Reagan almost swept the state. Reagan lost only three counties in 1980, and in 1984 he lost only five. One of the counties straying from the Republican camp in 1984, however, was significant: affluent Marin, just north of San Francisco. Marin had long been a Republican stronghold, but in 1984 it turned to the Democrats and has never looked back. In 1988, when Republican George H. W. Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, other suburban counties in northern California followed Marin, as a new political geography of California appeared. Almost all the rural counties have stayed Republican ever since, with the prominent exceptions of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Lake.

California Presidential Election 1988 Map from Dave Leip's AtlasCalifornia’s geopolitical transformation was linked to local cultural evolution and the changes in the social orientations of the two parties, both related to the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the Democratic Party increasingly turned to environmentalism and feminism, its support in the interior portion of the state withered. As the Republican Party embraced religiously infused social conservatism, it lost the affluent and relatively secular suburban counties of the Bay Area.

The county-level political reversal of California is strikingly evident in a comparison of California’s wealthiest county, Marin, with relatively poor, mostly rural Plumas County in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains. In 1960, Marin gave Democrat John Kennedy only 42 percent of its vote, whereas Plumas delivered 62 percent. In 1972, when Nixon overwhelmed George McGovern, Marin gave Nixon a seven percent edge, while Plumas favored McGovern by two percent. Yet by 2008, when Barack Obama enjoyed a whopping 57 percent margin over John McCain in Marin, Plumas went for McCain by a twelve percent margin. In neighboring Lassen County, once a Democratic stronghold, McCain’s margin of victory was thirty-four percent.

Mendocino county’s exception to the general rules of California’s recent political transformation will be the topic of a forthcoming GeoCurrents post.

*The colors are reversed because Leip began his remarkable atlas before the New York Times published its famous “Red America/Blue America” map, in which Republican-voting states and counties are depicted in red, and Democratic-voting ones in blue.

 

Political Complexities and Contradictions in California’s Mendocino County

Article-Grid, Cultural Geography, Elections, Geopolitics, North America, Northern California / By
California 2008 Election Map from Dave Leip's Atlas

California 2008 Election Map from Dave Leip's AtlasA GeoCurrents post last week highlighted the left-wing orientation of Anderson Valley in California’s Mendocino County, while noting that not all residents lean to the left. The same observation holds for Mendocino County as a whole. Recent election returns show roughly one-third of Mendocino voters selecting Republican candidates, including John McCain in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. As the election map posted here shows—in Dave Leip’s reverse color scheme*—Barack Obama’s 69 percent of the local vote was lower than what he received in counties to the south. Marin County gave 78 percent of its votes to Obama, and San Francisco 84 percent.

But as recent posts in the GeoNotes section of this blog have emphasized, maps that depict only most important patterns can miss significant secondary configurations. Unnoted in the first map is the fact that the county’s Democratic-voting block skews farther leftward than those elsewhere in the state. This tendency can be seen in the returns of the 2000 presidential election, although again it is not evident in the map. The second image posted here makes it seem as if Democratic candidate Al Gore barely won the county. Hidden are the votes gathered by far-left challenger Ralph Nader—which I have therefore added for Mendocino and several nearby counties. As can be seen, Nader’s fifteen percent take in Mendocino was double what he gathered in Marin and San Francisco, and five-times what he received in the Silicon Valley counties of Santa Clara and San Mateo.

The strongly left-leaning orientation of the Mendocino electorate has been evident in other recent elections. The county was the first in the United States to ban genetically modified crops, which it did by a popular vote of 57 percent in 2004. Subsequently, three other California counties, Marin, Santa Cruz, and Trinity, followed suit. But in both Sonoma County to the south of Mendocino and Humboldt County to the north, similar ballot measures failed. Note also that a number of counties in California’s Central Valley have passed resolutions expressly endorsing genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

But as is often the case, local political coloration turns out to be more complex the more carefully it is examined. Mendocino’s anti-GMO resolution received strong backing from the wine industry, which wanted to maintain its environmentally responsible reputation, especially in export markets. Environmental proposals that would harm or inconvenience local vintners often have a different outcome. On one issue in particular, Mendocino County maintains a starkly anti-environmental stance: it is the only county in the state without a grading ordinance. In Mendocino, landowners can do almost anything they want with bulldozers, leveling their properties as they see fit. Grading has long been a hot topic, as environmentalists, concerned about erosion and endangered salmon-runs, push for regulation, while wine producers, ranchers, and others tend to lobby against it.

The lack of a grading ordinance shows that Mendocino’s leftist proclivities bend in a libertarian direction. Not surprisingly, marijuana-growers tend to advocate a “government hands-off” approach to issues that affect their own operations. But there has also been a broader libertarian left-right convergence on several local issues. Outsiders are often astounded at how rural property owners in Mendocino flout building-permit requirement. The county government largely ignores such violations in rural areas. To compensate for the resulting revenue loss, it has come to assess property taxes by aerial surveys, which reveal unregistered recent construction.

Beyond grading issues, Mendocino County’s environmental record leaves much to be desired. Both wine and marijuana have a sizable water demand, and although total precipitation is heavy, summers are bone-dry. As a result of expanding cultivation, the summer flow of the Navarro River and other local streams is diminishing. The biggest environmental failing, however, is the electricity consumption of the marijuana industry. Although most growing in the county occurs outdoors, indoor cultivation is increasingly common, as prices are higher, seclusion is easier, and harvests occur year-round.  The carbon-footprint of the practice, however, is extraordinarily large, as the necessary high-intensity lighting, ventilation, and de-humidification all have a major power draw. According to the New York Times, for California as a whole, “indoor [cannabis] cultivation is responsible for a whopping 8 percent of household electricity usage, costing about $3 billion yearly and producing the annual carbon emission of a million average cars.”

*The colors are reversed because Leip began his superb atlas before the New York Times published its famous “Red America/Blue America” map in which Republican-voting states and counties are depicted in red, and Democratic-voting ones in blue.