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The post-election reality is not just red and blue

by Matt Edens

Some folks are rethinking the whole Secession thing, 139 years after the fact. Granted, the context has changed, from “The South will Rise Again” to “F••• The South,” as an email I was forwarded by a colleague started out. A website someone sent me a link to took the sentiment a step further and redrew the map of North America, with Canada creeping across the border and along each coast to include those “blue” states that voted for Kerry. The Reds—not the godless commies, mind you, but the Bible-thumping Fundies who voted for the Chimperor Bushitler, as he’s affectionately known to some folks—have their own country carved out for them named, appropriately, “Jesusland.”

Now, as soothing as this sort of salve is to some folks’ post-election psyche, the reality is somewhat more nuanced, dare I say, than the whole Red/Blue divide suggests. And you don’t have to go very far for an example. In fact, Knox County itself is a pretty interesting case study.

The heart of one of the most reliably Republican congressional districts in the country (indeed one that has sent a Republican to Congress ever since such a thing was possible), Knox County should be about as Red as Red America gets. And it is, at first glance. Bush won over Kerry with 62 percent of the vote—roughly the same ratio as he won his home state of Texas. Kerry won Massachusetts by a similar 67-32 ratio. If you look at the precinct map, the same red/blue divide emerges (only reversed): Kerry carried the inner-city and some inner-suburbs. Bush won the suburban and rural vote. Indeed, on Election Day, the president won every single precinct outside the city limits. Early voting, which occurred in record numbers this year, isn’t broken down by precinct, so I make these observations with a few reservations.

Simply shaded red or blue, the precinct map, like the national map, distorts things. Many precincts, like most states, including the supposedly “solid” South that has some people so angry, were within five percentage points of one another. Some were literally tossups: Bush won Wards 24N (Pellissippi’s Division Street Campus), 25 (S. Knox Community Center) and 32 (Spring Hill Elementary) by a single vote. Ward 48 (Pond Gap Elementary) was an exact tie. There were only a handful of blowouts. Most of those, mimicking his 89-9 percent rout of Bush in the District of Columbia, favored Kerry. And all came in precincts whose African-American demographics parallel D.C.’s. The senator won Wards 14E (Austin East) 88-10 and 14M (Walter P. Taylor Homes) 89-10. The president won only one precinct by more than 80 percent: Gap Creek School in South Knox County, by a margin of 82-17. Overall Kerry won only a single South Knoxville precinct, 26 (Dogwood Elementary), by a mere 12 votes. Inner-suburban North Knoxville neighborhoods: Norwood, Inskip, Ridgedale and Fountain City, likewise went to Bush.

Now I’ve heard a few local “progressives” second the European press position that it was the “gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, foreigner-despisin’, non-passport-ownin’ rednecks” that put the president over the top (or so said Britain’s Daily Mirror, in a front page article entitled “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB”).

A variation on the “Jesusland” business, the notion that all Bush voters are inbred and ignorant is equally soothing, so long as you don’t stop to contemplate its appeal to swing voters. But the idea that a college degree equals a Democratic voting tendency isn’t as “reality-based” as one might think. Not in Knox County, at least. With few exceptions, the precincts with the highest percentages of college graduates voted for Bush. And Kerry posted his biggest wins in the African-American inner city, where college degrees are scarce and church attendance high. College students, despite Rock the Vote’s draft debate, didn’t do much for Kerry, either. Bush carried Ward 10S, the UT Campus, and even managed to win 41 percent of the vote at Fort Sanders School. There was, however, one bright spot for Democrats: Nader, in his best showing across the county, managed a mere 14 votes (1.47 percent) in Fort Sanders, compared to 45 votes four years ago. Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate, posted his best numbers in Fort Sanders as well: 13 votes.

Still, a Democrat can dream. One local web pundit proposed—in jest, I think—that progressive minded folks infiltrate Red America. A few hundred-thousand insurgent immigrants in Louisiana or Tennessee, the thinking goes, and in four years those states flip from red to blue. That sounds pretty clever until you realize that Farragut, the place that has the highest number of residents who have relocated from out of state, voted for Bush three to one.

November 11, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 46 © 2004 Metro Pulse