I saw a good article a few years ago explaining the blue swath running basically east-west through the Deep South. Help me please? Thanks!
Here’s a recent article. Pretty fascinating, actually. Geology is destiny!
Also see the Blue Driftless Area in Iowa, Wisconsi, Illinois, and Minnesota.
If that’s not it, then it was very similar, going back to the ancient coastline. I think I read it a few years ago. This one seems to say the same stuff.
It’s also interesting to note that, except for hwy 90, which clips across the very top of that area, there are no interstate freeways which cross it–you have to go around, or hit the back roads.
Says the guy who lived in Dubuque for a year and a half.
More here: The Black Belt
Wisconsi? What, one Wisconsin’s not enough for you? :eek:
That guy mentions the Ozarks, which I can shed some light on. Northwest Arkansas was for most of history the hinterlands here in Arkansas. Imagine the almost total isolation of living in a place with regular mountain snow and little or no roads in the 1800s while the rest of the state is on a plantation economy. That very-poor-mountainous-northwest vs. moderately-poor-agricultural-east split continued for most of the twentieth century.
For whatever reason, NWA sprouted three of the world’s largest companies in the last decades of the 20th century: Walmart, Tyson, and JB Hunt. They plus the universities have spurred an explosion of development which has attracted thousands of conservative whites to the already conservative region, cementing its position as the Republican base in Arkansas. You end up with another inversion where the rural farming portion of the state (plus Little Rock) is more Democratic.
That said, Democratic dominance in the south and east was precarious for a moment around 2000, and has suffered huge losses in 2008-2012. It looks like that’s a trend now instead of a fluke.
The Driftless Area, since it was not covered during the last Ice Age, is a lot more topologically varied. Rivers kept flowing and had more time to carve deep valleys, in addition to the fact there were no glaciers that scraped the land when they receded. I’d imagine it’d be a pain in the ass to carve out interstates through that.