There's kind of a silly argument going on over this -- which tends to turn on whether Brown County (where Hackett ran 20 points ahead of Kerry) is described as "rural" or "exurban." (The Census Bureau lists Brown as part of the Cincinnati metro area and the county gained about 20% in population in the 90s, so I'll go with exurban). One problem is that only parts of Hamilton & Warren Counties are within the district (and so it's harder to figure out the Kerry vote), and between them, they cast 56 percent of the district vote. But from what I can tell, Hackett ran about 14-15 points or so ahead of Kerry in both of them. (Unfortunately, I can't find the Kerry vote for the portion of the city of Cincinnati contained within the 2nd, although it appears to be heavily Republican. The Hamilton County suburbs within the 2nd are very Republican -- Kerry won only about 30 percent there -- and their residents outnumber Cincinnatians within the district by about 2-to-1. The gap among voters is probably even greater. So Hackett's 49% in Hamilton County is quite impressive).
If Hackett made bigger gains over Kerry in rural than in suburban/exurban areas, it was a matter of a percentage point or two -- nothing to make a big deal about. And even that may have been due to the presence of some conservative Democrats who would vote for a pro-gun Iraq vet over a Massachusetts liberal. And those rural counties had too few people to matter much, anyway.
And that's that for me on this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I had been to this weblog once before (perhaps via Front Page Magazine)... As a "PoliSigh" graduate (who will begin graduate school in that in an unfortunately-short amount of time ;-) ), I am glad that there is a group weblog about this subject, which also covers current affairs. I commented yesterday at another blogger's entry on that Ohio race that I think that the results were quite significant... Here are some brief thoughts of mine about this topic, from the night of the election. I haven't had a chance to blog about this yet, but basically, I think that it may show a growing discontent, including among conservatives and Republican voters, at the statist and neoconservative policies - on both domestic and foreign matters - of the GOP Establishment, at the state and national levels. Also, I think that if the election had been held two days later, the final outcome may have been reversed.
Please let me know what your thoughts on this are.
Post a Comment