What a Difference a Week Makes
San Francisco -- I still smile whenever I read or hear the phrase, "President-Elect Obama." And as we learn more about the election results, it becomes even clearer that Americans voted overwhelmingly for "new energy for America." Since the election, environmentalists have picked up another key Senate seat, in Oregon, where Jeff Merkley unseated Gordon Smith. Seven of 2008's "Dirty Dozen," selected every year by the League of Conservation Voters, are gone.
Every four years, the New York Times publishes a county-by-county "Voting Shifts" map showing how much change there was in each county's vote for the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. This year's map illustrates a striking fact: Most of the country -- almost all of the country -- got bluer. Even regions that Obama didn't carry (with one significant exception) gave him a bigger percentage of the vote than they gave to John Kerry. Yes, rural counties in Arizona got redder, as did some in Alaska -- but both states, while going for McCain, did so by a smaller percentage than they did for Bush in 2004. Obama's mandate is national, not regional. Even in conservative Utah, every county voted a lot more Democratic than in 2004.
What was the one big exception? There's a crescent of redder counties beginning on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border, swooping down through the coal fields of West Virginia, Virginia, eastern Kentucky, through Tennessee, northern Alabama, and over into the oil and gas fields of Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. This geography has two commonalities: It's the heart of the "Bible Belt," the region of strong, socially conservative, and overwhelmingly white evangelical Christianity, and it's the center of America's dependence on fossil fuels. Carbon-dependent counties went more strongly for John McCain than they had for George Bush -- while the rest of the country swung the other way. You can literally see the new energy economy and the new politics that it powers emerging on this chart.
Now, Obama didn't beat McCain as handily as Bill Clinton beat Bush, Sr. and Bob Dole -- because there was no Ross Perot to pull off disaffected Republicans. But he got an absolute majority of the vote, which Clinton never did, and far more absolute votes than any president in recent history. There's a mandate there -- the challenge will be to take advantage of it.
