Is Florida getting bluer?

The answer is a definite ... maybe.

The Palm Beach Post offers some evidence that America's Wang™ indeed may be trending bluer ... but I believe the data might be a bit deceptive.

You can get to the interactive maps here, featuring county-by-county statistics by scrolling over the desired county. You also may click on each map below to go to the interactive one. But I've captured them for you here in a static format for discussion purposes.

First, county-by-county voter registration as of August 2007. Of course, blue counties are majority Democratic, while red counties are majority Republican.

To me, the surprise is the central panhandle and, to a lesser extent, the center of the state. Look at all the blue there! And the raw numbers are even more surprising, with Democrats holding a 2-to-1 majority or more in many of those counties. For example:

Taylor County: 8,770 Dem, 2,695 Rep
Baker County: 8,438 Dem, 3,879 Rep
Liberty County: 3,325 Dem, 370 Rep
Glades County: 3,801 Dem, 1,692 Rep

But what happened in the elections? You undoubtedly remember:



In the actual election results, the only blue counties left in north Florida are Gadsden, Leon, and Jefferson, around Tallahassee -- the home of FSU and FAMU; and Alachua, which contains Gainesville -- the home of UF. And the center of the state? Pretty much all red.

The numbers are rather startling. Let's look at our four counties again:

2000
Taylor: Bush 4,056, Gore 2,649
Baker: Bush 5,610, Gore 2,392
Liberty: Bush 1,317, Gore 1,017
Glades: Bush 1,841, Gore 1,442

2004
Taylor: Bush 5,467, Kerry 3,049
Baker: Bush 7,738, Kerry 2,180
Liberty: Bush 1,927, Kerry 1,070
Glades: Bush 2,443, Kerry 1,718

So, what gives? Democrats have a modest majority in registration, 4.1 million to 3.8 million ... but the Republicans dominate nearly the entire state (save basically for the three large counties of southeast Florida). Ultimately, I think there are three key factors at play here:

First, voter turnout. In both 2000 and 2004, it seems that every Republican voter went to the polls, while many Democrats stayed home. Of course, that's not likely to be the case, but an argument certainly can be made that the Republicans did a far more effective job of GOTV (get out the vote) than did the Democrats. That, quite simply, is an organizational issue that the Florida Democratic Party must address in 2008.

Second, the social conservatism of rural counties. The high Democratic registration of Florida's rural areas is a vestige of history. Most of those residents have lived in those areas for generations, and their parents and grandparents were Democrats in the mold of FDR or LBJ. These are largely agricultural areas, which tended to be controlled by Democrats for much of the last century because Democratic politicians presumably were for the "little man," the family farmer and the small storekeeper, that kind of thing.

However, these are also areas where faith, specifically Christian faith, imbues every town and hamlet along the way. "Family values" resonate here as they do in so many places in the deep South, for indeed, rural Florida is just as "deep South" as any part of Alabama or South Carolina or any other state you'd choose. So while there are a lot of "Democrats," we would recognize them today more as "DLC Democrats" at best, whose tolerance for different religions, different races, and different lifestyles typically is extremely limited. They surely are not "progressive" in any real sense of the word.

Finally, unaffiliated or "other" voters. There are 2.3 million registered voters who are neither Republican nor Democrat, and in this swing state, they hold the balance. Presumably the overwhelming numbers for Bush in 2000 and 2004 in many nominally "blue" counties were helped by an influx of unattached or "undecided" voters, who voted their social mores ahead of their economic well-being and chose the Republicans.

If Florida truly is going to be bluer, the Democrats must address these three key areas. They have to find a way to increase voter turnout, to make progressive stances more palatable to the rural voter, and to attract the unaffiliated voter by emphasizing economic issues and the war, on which we on the Left are clearly in the majority. Certatinly as society becomes more and more tolerant and open-minded, the social issues will be easier for the Democrats to "win." But I believe that is going to be the main front in the battle for 2008 and beyond.

Is Florida really bluer? It depends on your definition. Are there more Democrats? Yes. Are they progressive, modern Democrats? Absolutely not. And that's where we must focus our energies.

My earliest political memory: 35 years ago today

Recently, I was conversing with some fellow Atriots in our "chat room," and we began discussing our earliest political memories. At first, I said it was Watergate for me, which of course dominated the headlines and the TV news reports through much of 1973 and 1974, around when I was in third grade. But then I recalled the 1972 presidential election, of which I have vague memories ... and then I remembered the assassination attempt on Democratic presidential contender and former Alabama governor George Wallace.

Man, I'm getting old.

Wallace was shot 35 years ago today, in a shopping center parking lot in Laurel, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. I was six years old at the time, and it remains today my earliest specific political memory.

Because I was not even three when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed, and of course I wasn't yet born when JFK was assassinated, the Wallace shooting became a sort of marker for me, my earliest awareness of an intersection between politics and violence.

I don't want to place greater emphasis on this event than it deserves, although in historical terms it was significant because it derailed what was a strengthening presidential campaign for the former segregationist known best for barring black students from the University of Alabama. Needless to say, we'll never know if Wallace could have won the Democratic nomination (the eventual nominee was, of course, George McGovern), let alone thwart Richard Nixon's re-election bid. The shooting left Wallace paralyzed and wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life; he died in 1998.

It was, however, precisely the sort of occurrence that stuck in the mind of a certain impressionable six-year-old in suburban Detroit, and that remains to this day an important, albeit ever fading, snapshot in the album of my mind.