The Ghosts of Political Leanings Michael Barone
To understand changes in the political map, we naturally tend to look for contemporary explanations. But American political alignments are not written on an empty slate. Beginnings matter, and the civic personalities of states tend to reflect the cultural folkways of their first settlers.
So I was not startled when I compared state poll results in this election with the results of the 2004 election and found patterns that reflect the surges of historic internal migration. For this year's polls, I used the results from the website fivethirtyeight.com, which discounts results based on its estimates of pollsters' accuracy and the recentness of the polls. Thus they don't fully reflect the recent tightening of the national polls.
In two broad swaths of the country, John McCain is running about as well as George W. Bush did or better. One is the route of the westward surge of New England Yankees across Upstate New York, northern Ohio, southern Michigan, and into northern Illinois. McCain is running ahead of Bush in Massachusetts and just 1 percent behind in New York and (despite its economic problems) Michigan. Historically, this Yankee-settled region has been turned off by southern accents, like Bush's Texas twang, and McCain evidently is less off-putting to its cultural liberals. Read On
