We’ve heard a lot of speculation about what this year’s presidential election supposedly means. Were Americans simply voting for Barack Obama, a charismatic peacemaker with a worker-friendly tax plan? Or were they also voting against something, and if so, what? Republican incompetence? Neocon arrogance? The Iraq War? The economic meltdown? Negative campaigning?
After reading georgia10’s front-page story “22%” on Daily Kos — specifically, after looking at the New York Times maps she embedded — I think we can figure out what most Americans were voting against in a single glance, by seeing who embraced Obama and, more important, who rejected him.
Does this map look familiar? If you’ve read my Daily Kos diaries on David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, it should.