In recent decades, national politics has increasingly coalesced around two diametrically opposed regional coalitions. On the “blue” side stand Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. This “Northern” alliance has been the champion of collective action for the common good, the maintenance of a strong central government, federal checks on corporate power, and the conservation of natural resources, regardless of which party was dominant in the region at any given time. The presidents they have produced — Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and Barack Obama — have all sought to better society through government programs, expanded civil rights protections, and environmental safeguards. All faced opposition from the Dixie-led regions, even from within their own parties. These northern regions have become overwhelmingly Democratic in recent years. Republicans once dominated New England but are now an endangered species there. Even after the 2016 presidential election, Democrats hold 11 of the region’s 12 Senate seats (including two independents who caucus with them), nine of 12 legislative chambers, and all but one of both its Electoral College electors and its representatives to the House.
In the “red” coalition are the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and the Far West, three regions that have always emphasized individual liberty, small government, constraints on federal power, and a laissez-faire approach to social and economic policy. This core bloc has a population somewhat larger than the blue one — 125 million to 92 million — but is less stable owing to differing ideals regarding equality and egalitarianism. In Greater Appalachia, there is considerable emphasis on individual pride and dignity and hostility to authority and inherited status; in the great meritocratic struggle for survival, the region’s ideology goes, each person should have their fair shake, a position shared in the Far West. The Deep Southern oligarchy, by contrast, traditionally held that a social Darwinian struggle took place generations ago, and they were the rightful winners and thus deserve to maximize their liberty, a position that until the 1860s included the freedom to enslave others.
Slavery is gone, but Deep Southern political leaders have continued to focus on cutting taxes for the rich, maintaining subsidies to agribusiness and oil companies, fighting robust labor and environmental laws, and the expansion of social programs, which isn’t always in sync with the Far West, especially. The coalition has produced only one Republican president in living memory — George W. Bush — but accounts for the vast majority of the Tea Party caucus in the House, which generally promotes the Deep Southern agenda. At its peak in 2011, 51 of the Tea Party’s 60 members came from the three-region bloc, compared to three from the regions of the “Northern alliance.” It also gave Donald Trump almost all of its Electoral College votes, though much of the Far West saw sharp shifts away from him in comparison with previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
These regional divides can even trump the powerful political differences between rural and urban communities. Conventional wisdom holds that rural, white, less-than-affluent voters vote Republican, and yet in both 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama won every such county in northern New England save one, and most of those in Wisconsin, northeast Iowa, and the North Country of New York. Eighteen of the 92 urban core counties in the United States — defined as containing the central city of a metro area with at least a quarter-million people — voted Republican in the three presidential elections between 2000 and 2010; 15 of those are located within the three regions of the “red coalition,” and none were within the blue one.
Here’s the critical problem for American governance: Neither of these coalitions by themselves have the electoral power to control the essential levers of federal power—majorities in the Electoral College, the House, and a filibuster-proof Senate majority. These coalitions agree on very little — which is why compromise has become so difficult — and neither of their respective programs are fully appealing enough to swing regions to forge a broader and lasting coalition. Elections are nail-biters, decided by the shifting allegiances of a relatively small number of voters from a small and recurring collection of battleground counties, most of them in the Midlands.
He discusses how various regions might be swung by the red or the blue, but his most strident message is time is running out:
tinfoilparachute 