Sunday, 7 November 2004

Alabama's blue belt

Looking at the red/blue county map, it’s pretty easy to correlate most of the blue counties with major urban population centers.

One thing that has me mystified, though, is the neat blue line bisecting otherwise red Alabama horizontally, seemingly following the path of Highway 80, as far as I can tell, and bleeding over slightly into Mississippi and Georgia on either side. Montgomery, Alabama’s capital and second largest city, is in the middle of the blue strip, but what about the rest of it? What’s the explanation of Alabama’s “blue belt”?

Update: Chris explains in comments that Alabama's "blue belt" is Alabama's black belt.

# By Brock Sides @ 9:14 pm CST [Permalink] « (0)
Manual TrackBack URL for this entry: https://blog.lordsutch.com/tb.cgi/2131
Tags: Campaign 2004, Politics, The South
 

2 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. Chris Lawrence wrote @ Sun, 7 Nov 2004, 8:50 pm CST:

Ah, that’s Alabama’s “black belt,” a predominantly black area of the state (similar to the Mississippi Delta). Clearly you haven’t read Southern Politics in State and Nation. ☺

 
[Permalink] 2. Len Cleavelin wrote @ Mon, 8 Nov 2004, 7:26 am CST:

Does the same explanation hold for the belt of blue counties in MS on the banks of the Mississippi River?

As a Missourian in exile, the great mystery for me is that little blue county just south of St. Louis. Not the identity; I know Sainte Genevieve County well (Ste. Gen is one of my favorite towns in MO), but I’m wondering why it went blue. The other three blue jurisdictions (Jackson County, St. Louis County, and St. Louis City) don’t pose any mystery to me, for obvious reasons.

 
Comments are now closed on this post.

Like what you’re reading?

To view other posts at Signifying Nothing, please visit the BlogFront.

Random Thoughts…

Signifying Nothing formerly featured the stylings of Brock Sides, a left-leaning philosopher turned network administrator currently residing in Memphis, Tennessee who now blogs at Battlepanda, and Robert Prather, a libertarian-leaning conservative economist and occasional contributor at OTB.

Syndication Feeds

Recently… ↓