Tuesday, September 13, 2005

50 States on Choice

50 States on Choice

As the Roberts hearings slog on into Day 2, my new favorite tool Survey USA comes out with a 50 state choice survey. And as usual I'm going to another great site, US Election Atlas, and running the results through the electoral college:



It's a pro-choice landslide: 56% - 38% in the popular vote, with the electoral college breaking out 435-100 and a tie in North Dakota.

Of course, this assumes that perople were voting on that ONE ISSUE, and obviously pro-choice voters aren't doing that. If Roe gets overturned, the GOP will need to work that into their electoral calculations.

The other interesting thing is the map. You don't see a simple North-South divide, or even a Red-Blue map. Instead, there's a broad swath of anti-choice states running along the Appalachians, from West Virginia to Alabama (Pennsylvania is the least pro-choice state won by Kerry), with spurs into other small-town and rural dominated states (and heavily Catholic Louisiana - the survey was pre-hurricane). There's another small-town rural chunk in the Dakotas and Nebraska, and funally you have the Mormon belt of Utah and Idaho.

The surprise here is that the fastest growing parts of the South - the Atlantic states and TEXAS (!) - show up as pro-CHOICE. That makes it more clear that the choice battle is an urban-rural fight.

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