Obama bucks

I saw this over at Matt's site, and before I read the actual post, concluded subconsciously that it must've come from the south or the rust belt or Appalachia or somewhere like that. But then I saw the word "California" and clicked the link which took me to the website of the Riverside Press Enterprise, which was one of my three hometown papers (the other two were the San Bernardino County Sun and the Redlands Daily Facts).

Not much to add here, except that this is yet another striking reminder that California's a much different kind of "blue" state than is, say, Massachusetts. The dense population centers outside of San Diego and Orange counties are liberal enough to give California's electoral votes to the Democrats every four years. But for the most part the rest of the state is bright red. San Diego and Orange counties themselves are very Republican (the way the Republican parts of Northern Virginia are Republican) and the rest of the state resembles the interior west--deeply religious, and just as deeply conservative. This is true in rural counties like Kern and Kings as well as in suburb-rich, but less affluent counties like Riverside and San Bernardino--where, as you can see, one still finds a good deal of ugly racial (and sexual) intolerance.

You can sort of see what I'm talking about in graph form if you take a look at the image below which I stole from fivethirtyeight.com.

My strong hunch is that if you lopped San Diego and Orange counties off the coast, California would jump up (and perhaps a little to the left), putting it closer to Oregon and Washington, where it rightfully belongs--after all, in most other parts of the state, conservatives are just as (if not more) conservative, and liberals are more (sometimes much more) liberal.