Atlas of the 2008 Elections.

Abstract

ATLAS OF THE 2008 ELECTIONS. Edited by STANLEY D. BRUNN, GERALD R. WEBSTER, RICHARD L. MORRILL, FRED M. SHELLEY, STEPHEN J. LAVIN, and J. CLARK ARCHER. xiv and 320 pp.: maps, diagrs., ills., bibliog., index. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780742567955. Elections in all democratic countries are fundamentally geographical but even more so in the United States, which turns the national presidential election into a series of winner-takes-all state-level elections through the unique electoral college. Spatial variation of the electorate in the United States is influenced by a variety of demographic, economic, and social characteristics, many of which have been quite durable over time, as shown in the Atlas of the 2008 Elections. Although the 2008 presidential election was seen as a watershed in American politics with the election of the first African American president, the atlas demonstrates that the underlying geographical patterns of voting were actually rather similar to those in several previous elections. The team of six editors and forty-five contributors, consisting mostly of academic geographers, have put together a superb and richly illustrated explanation of the spatial and temporal differences in the U.S. electorate. The maps help to disentangle characteristics of the population from settlement patterns in the United States, which helps answer the perennial question of why the map of state-level election results is so red but the election is so close. It should be read by geographers, geography students, political scientists, the electorate, and the campaign staff of both major political parties. The atlas covers the 2008 primaries, the campaigns, the general elections, regional patterns and swing states, voter turnouts, selected economic, demographic, and religious correlates, key state-level elections, and nonpartisan referenda. It is written in very accessible language and consists of a number of short entries that explain the underlying geographical patterns of one or a series of maps or charts. A strength of the atlas is its historical perspective on the changes in the geographical pattern of voting going back to 1948 in some cases. It is through such longitudinal analysis, much of it at the county level, that the durability of voting patterns can be detected. This demonstrates that there is significant continuity in the parties, which achieved the majority of votes in each county and that very few counties change significantly over election cycles. Such analysis shows that 2008 was hardly the watershed many thought it was but that the Democratic Party won because it was able to gain the share of the two-party vote it had enjoyed during the victories of President Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. The underlying demographics of the voting patterns are clearly visible in the series of maps. Part of the explanation for the Republican wins of 2000 and 2004 is that counties supporting the Republican Party grew faster than the national average did but that this growth had slowed by 2008. …