A comparison of data below the USA Today county election maps for the presidential race of 2004 and 2000 shows that Bush increased the land area of counties he won from 2,432,603 to 2.54 million square miles. Meanwhile, Kerry increased the area of counties won by the Democratic candidate from 577,029 to 592,000 square miles.
Did USA Today just do a terrible job of estimating the latest figures, or did we annex some more of Mexico while I wasn’t looking?
Gee, it couldn’t be that Bush and Kerry/Gore weren’t the only candidates, could it? IIRC, Ralph Nader pulled in a significant fraction of the popular vote in 2000; although he didn’t collect any electoral votes by winning a whole state, I’ll bet he won some counties …
Haven’t found a county-by-county count, but according to Wikipedia:
“Minor-party candidates received many fewer votes [in 2004], dropping from a total of 3.5 per cent in 2000 to approximately one percent.”
So it’s very likely that the increase in counties won is derived from the extra 2.5% of the popular vote that the Republicrats snagged from other parties.
No chance on the third parties. No third party candidate has carried a county since Ross Perot in 1992.
It’s theoretically possible that Bush and Gore ended up in a tie in some big county in 2000, but I don’t believe that happened, and if it did, their 2000 map doesn’t show it.
The 2000 USA Today figures appear to be closer to the truth. The Census Bureau gives the area of the United States, excluding Alaska, as 2,966,000 square miles. The USA Today count rose from 3,010,000 sq m in 2000 to 3,132,000 sq m in 2004. It’s normal for area tallies to disagree with one another to a small degree (tidal areas, mouths of rivers, and so on), but the 2004 figure is too large. Either they figured out a way to give Bush credit for at least part of Alaska, or they just made a mistake.
I think I’ll take that bet.
Nader didn’t reach 20% in any of the forty “voting districts” in the only state(Alaska) he got more than 7% of the total vote.
I thought we elect politicians based on the number of votes cast by humans and not by the total land area they claim. Am I wrong?
That was exactly what I was going to post. Who the hell bothers with this stuff? Land area is completely irrelevant to an election!
Never mind. Re-reading the OP, I see it was USA (“We’re eating more beets!”) Today, which surprises me not at all.
Nader did keep Kerry under 50% in some of the places he won, though. Perhaps they were only counting counties where the candidate got over 50% of the vote?
It’s just another way to illustrate what we already knew…that rural areas, with a low population density, tend to vote Republican, and urban areas, with a high pop. density, tend to vote Democratc.