Posted on 11/16/2004 1:06:20 PM PST by Mike Fieschko
This will be a first in a series of posts breaking down the election results by region, hopefully shedding some light on which areas swung to the President or to Kerry, and why. My previous work in this area is collected here in the Research section.
To lead off, I’ll present for your consideration this insightful piece by Robert David Sullivan. After the 2000 election, he broke the country down into ten political regions, and he compares the 2004 results with 2000 in each of them. I do have some quibbles with the method; a division into ten regions, while useful sociologically, doesn’t necessarily capture the real fault lines when it comes to voting behavior in 2004. Either of the county-by-county swing maps demonstrates this.
Nonetheless, we don’t disagree over the important shifts that took place in the Northeast in this election. While not enough to shift any states into the Bush column, President Bush’s marked improvement along the Northeast Corridor lays a strong foundation for their return, one or two elections hence, into full-fledged battleground status. This development also lays waste to the notion of evangelical “values voters” being solely responsible for the President’s popular vote margin. Sullivan writes:
The next most Democratic region was Northeast Corridor, but, as noted above, it's here that Bush partially erased his popular-vote deficit from 2000. Nationally, four of the five counties with the biggest GOP gains, in raw votes, were those that make up Long Island. Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties all went for Kerry, but his margin there was more than 250,000 votes short of Gore's in 2000. At the same time, Staten Island flipped from 57 percent for Gore to a 50 percent win for Bush, while New Jersey's Ocean County (which has a high retiree population) went from a 49 percent plurality for Bush in 2000 to a 60 percent landslide this time.
I don’t think there’s any denying a significant 9/11 effect in these returns. In New York City, Bush’s vote surged from 399,627 to 492,629. In Long Island and Westchester, it went from 607,224 to 720,719. Out of over 3,100 county units in America, Richmond County (Staten Island), home to more than its fair share of police and firefighters, turned in Bush’s 32nd strongest swing in the nation -- a spot usually reserved for tiny rural outliers. (The swing to Bush in the Rockaways, once we get the precinct results, must have been remarkable.) Looking at Bush’s most improved counties from 2000, you have to scroll down the list to Hidalgo County, Texas (12.76% swing to Bush) and Honolulu, Hawaii (12.23% swing) to find a county with more than 100,000 votes cast that isn’t in New York or New Jersey.
That’s only part of the story, though. The second part is that President Bush was able to make a significant move into John Kerry’s New England base – and specifically the heavily Catholic southern tier extending all the way up to Boston. In terms of his actual vote share, Rhode Island was President Bush’s second most improved state in the nation, second only to Hawaii. In John Kerry’s home state, President Bush managed not just to hold his own, but to turn in his 9th most solid improvement. In fact, to evaluate the claim that “values voters” were the pivotal factor in this race, let’s look at Bush’s most improved states, according to Real Clear Politics:
Hawaii (4) Bush +7.8%
Rhode Island (4) Bush +7.0%
New Jersey (15) Bush +6.2%
Alabama (9) Bush +6.0%
Tennessee (11) Bush +5.7%
Connecticut (7) Bush +5.6%
New York (31) Bush +5.3%
Oklahoma (7) Bush +5.3%
Massachusetts (12) Bush +4.5%
Louisiana (9) Bush +4.2%
On this list are six blue states (five of them in the Northeast Corridor) with 73 electoral votes and four red states with 36 electoral votes.
Bush’s gains throughout New England weren’t uniform to be sure; Vermont saw the President’s worst decline since 2000; New Hampshire turned in a less than stellar 0.9% vote gain for the President, and flipped to Kerry; ditto for Maine, without the flip. Where was the dividing line between these two very different sets of results?
The line runs through Massachusetts and New Hampshire. On one side there are the blue-collar Catholic urban and suburban areas, in which President Bush staged a strong recovery. On the other is the small-town Yankee-Protestant interior, which turned to Kerry. If Kerry was in fact the hometown favorite, it manifested itself far from Louisburg Square, in rural Vermont and New Hampshire. Closer to home, the booing when Kerry bounced the ball at Fenway was apparently the real deal.
You should take any exit poll data with several ounces of salt, but I looked at these exit poll results in the Northeast Corridor, and they were simply too consistent and too significant to simply shove aside. In large measure, it seems that Catholic voters are what drove the President’s strong gains in this region:
The Catholic Vote
Bush 2000 Bush 2004 Change
Massachusetts 32% 49% +17
Rhode Island 35% 40% +5
Connecticut 42% 53% +11
New York 40% 51% +11
New Jersey 51% 58% +7
Maine 44% 40% -4
Vermont 48% 48% +0
The Catholic rejection of Kerry in his own backyard is simply staggering. Take your pick at the most eye-popping statistic: the fact that Massachusetts Catholics turned to the President to the tune of 17 points; or the fact that Catholics, who voted 78% for John F. Kennedy, are now among the most Republican groups in the Northeast.
Leave aside the controversy over Kerry and the Church. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen in American politics – voters who share some fundamental attribute in common with you aren’t supposed to abandon you; quite the opposite. I look at the splotches of Kerry gains in places like western Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, and think that the images of the candidate snowboarding must have made a difference. But on the vastly more important question of faith, Kerry faced a dramatic backlash, and it wasn’t evangelicals who turned away.
Several explanations are available to us. The first is that churchgoing Catholics do hold Catholic political leaders to a higher standard – and the Senator found no sympathy among lapsed Catholics. The second is that he alienated both sides by seeming to straddle. The third is simply that blue collar Reagan Democrats, many of them Catholic, liked the grit they saw in George W. Bush at Ground Zero and ever since. All three have some validity, but Catholics being the least politicized of all the major faiths, especially in the Northeast, I tend towards the third.
Next up: Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan.
Excellent post. And thank you, Patrick.
"Staten Island flipped from 57 percent for Gore to a 50 percent win for Bush"
Good job, Patrick. I miss your old blog.
Thanks for posting this info from Patrick -- you really need to take a look at Patrick's blog -- he is also a Freeper!
Bump
Mike, please ping me if you intend to post the other post-election analyses in Patrick's series. Thanks.
Thanks. If you forget, I'll go looking for the other updates.
You maybe interested in some of this..........
Told ya.
Excellent analysis. I'm looking forward to the rest of your series.
Good stuff ~ Bump!
Are you sure Massachussetts is a majority Catholic state, or is it merely that the majority expressing a religious affiliation say they are Catholics? Surely not every voter in that state attends church.
Interesting election analysis...
much higher in 2000, I mean.
Excellent information.
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