RED AND BLUE AREAS WITHIN A STATE.

RED AND BLUE AREAS WITHIN A STATE. The New York Review of Books had commentary from several analysts on the midterm elections, and after the insightful comments about Flaubert that Jonathan Raban made on this blog recently, I turned eagerly to Jonathan Raban’s essay. It was a close factual analysis of the politics in the state of Washington—the kind of analysis that I wish there were more of. Raban breaks the state down into red areas (Republican) and blue areas (Democratic). He shows that there is a pattern that has persisted through several elections. There is a “rigid political frontier” along the Cascade Mountains, forty miles east of Seattle. Eastern Washington is red; Western Washington near Puget Sound is blue. Raban refers to a “deep, and very nearly equal, tribal division between the rural and urban parts of the state.” The results in Washington, as Raban points out in conclusion, were pretty much the same as in previous elections. As Raban puts it, an anti-Democrat gale was in the state of Washington only an “uncomfortably stiff breeze.”