Reply #12: Islands of enlightenment in a sea of ignorance. [View All]

[sofa king]

Here's an incomplete map I put together from Dave Leip's excellent election atlas showing how cities and counties within Virginia broke in 2004, with higher educational centers noted. (In Dave's maps, Democratic areas are red and Republican areas are blue.)



Those red (Democratic) areas are most often one of two things: high-population urban centers, or college towns, or both. In VA, small towns can be "cities" which are jurisdictionally distinct from the counties in which they exist, and in damned near every one of those tiny little red dots is a university of some sort.

As a result, the "smart" parts of Virginia show up brilliantly. It's amazing how important higher education is to the Democratic Party, especially in this state.

Other well educated areas are subsumed by the ignorance that surrounds them. For example, the biggest university in VA is Virginia Tech, but students aren't allowed to vote in Montgomery County and the rednecks outnumber the professors by a large margin. Still, even Montgomery shows up as a lighter blue, just below red Roanoke in SW VA.

That's the problem facing Virginia. As I have joked in the past, the only reason why Allen isn't running away with it completely is because many Virginians can't remember that there was a Washington Redskins coach before Joe Gibbs.