William J. Stuntz is a smart professor at Harvard Law School, and in this Tech Central Station article, provides an excellent and non-biased analysis of the voting patterns from Tuesday’s Presidential election, including the following observation:
The best way to see how the two sides stack up is to look at one of those red-and-blue maps that seem to breed these days. Divide the country into three parts: Kerry’s base, Bush’s base, and the Midwest. Kerry’s base is the Northeast — everything North of the Potomac River and East of Ohio — together with the Pacific Coast and Hawaii. (They don’t call it the “left coast” for nothing.) Kerry swept his base 194-0. Bush’s base is the South and the rest of the West. Bush swept his base too, by an electoral score of 237-0, assuming the New Mexico vote holds up. But Bush’s base is bigger. Which means Kerry needed to nearly sweep the Midwest to catch up. He did carry the Midwest, but not by much: 58-49 in the electoral college. Bush carried Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa — and he could have lost any of the last three without changing the result.