How America Invented the Red State
December 30, 2024 at 04:30PM“Red State” and “Blue State” are such common epithets in political pontification that it’s easy to forget that as recently as 1976, blue stood for Republicans on election-night maps. As now-Republican-red sweeps electoral maps, we spill more and more ink on trying to understand the (assumed to be) white, (assumed to be) rural Trump voter. But are we reifying an invented category—to our collective detriment—with all our analysis? Tarence Ray goes step-by-step through the books, ideas, and thinkers that turned the concept of “Red State” into what it is today.
It’s tempting to say that, to the extent this election was a referendum on how we feel about the heartland, American voters preferred Vance’s wonkishness to Walz’s homespun populism. Unfortunately, the election itself never quite got there: Neither the presidential nor the vice presidential debate meaningfully dealt with rural America. And yet the long-term effect of this election will likely be an ever more firmly entrenched red wall in the predominantly rural states in the middle of the country. As with every election since the turn of the millennium, this will drive Democratic Party operatives to continue conflating the population of red states with both “rural” and “white”—despite the fact that Trump gained ground in more than 90 percent of the nation’s counties since the last election. This was the case even in the so-called blue wall, which includes Minnesota, where he won four counties that had gone to Biden in 2020. And in the paradigmatic blue state of California, more than half a dozen formerly blue counties are now, so to speak, in the red. After all of the Harris campaign’s promises that America wouldn’t be “going back,” the Democrats will be plotting their next move with the opposition holding the White House and both chambers of Congress. “Look who’s in the big town,” Mellencamp sings.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/30/how-america-invented-the-red-state/
via IFTTT
Watch