I am unable to cite any support for the answer to the OP, but I have several friends tell me that Kerry only won 3 counties in the US in popular vote.
This sounds very hard to believe for me. Does anyone out there have the correct answer?
http://mwhodges.home.att.net/election2004.htm
This site doesn’t give totals for the number of counties, but it seems Kerry won at least one county in about 47 states, and easily won more than three in Texas. So it looks like your friend is full of it.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/ has a county-by-county map. Senator Kerry won many more than 3 counties. He won three in ARIZONA, for instance.
Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Utah are the only states in which he did not win a single county.
From the San Jose Mercury-News (sorry, they don’t seem to allow a working link):
Map of counties won by each candidate from Saturday’s USA Today. Kerry took far more than three counties, though Bush overwhelmed him on a county-by-county basis (largely because Kerry’s strength was concentrated in large-population urban counties) – 5/6 of U.S. counties by area went Bush, 1/6 Kerry.
Shows a county breakdown of the Bush/Kerry vote.
And Alaska. The more I think about it, the more I wonder how anybody came up with this idea. Did MadSam’s friend think Kerry couldn’t win three counties in Massachusetts?
Whoops. Indeed. Alaska.
Also note that the only states where President Bush didn’t win a single county are Hawaii, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
Just to add that is a picture of the country with red and blue counties, not a text file.
Dividing up who is more popular by determining who won the most counties is an even more misleading thing than pointing to the map of the country and showing that a majority of the area of the US went for Bush rather than Kerry.
County boundaries are somewhat abritrary now based on population trends.
And Texas has a lot of counties, but the state tried to keep them of fairly uniform size and shape.
But in a state like California, there are just 58 counties and one, Los Angeles, has nearly 9 million residents and I’m pretty sure that it provided more votes for both Kerry and Bush than any other county in the U.S.
Kerry 1694579
Bush 971357
So should the fact that Kerry won this county be less important than the fact that Bush won a bunch of rural counties in Texas with populations that are a fraction of this total?
Sorry, didn’t want to veer into GD territory.
Keep in mind that number of counties won means absolutely nothing.
I wish to God that we kept such careful track of how congressional districts voted, though. THAT says something.
Presidents (and any other elected official at any level) represent people, not acres of land. Counting the number of counties won is pointless, since counties vary wildly in population. For that matter, election maps are deceptive, since they tend to make less populated regions seem more important than they are.
Caledonia County, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, went for Bush.
Other have pointed out this is wrong. I’ll point out this is absurd. In every state Kerry won, he had to win at least one county. In a two person race (which this essentially was ), you can’t have the highest vote total in the state and have a lower vote total than your opponent in every portion of it
But Balthisar is right that House districts are useful. Each has roughly the same population, regardless of size. It would also give some clues as how a national system along the Maine/Nebraska model would affect the results.
You have some pretty sharp friends there.
As we all should know, Kerry carried Westcoast County, Uppermidwest County and Northwest County. Each county have subdivisions called states, and Kerry carried all of those within each of those three counties as well.
Correction. Northwest County was of course carried by Bush. Northeast County was the third one Kerry got.
MadSam, isn’t it time to find a new set of friends, since the ones you have now seem to know almost nothing about how the world works?
Kerry got the Northwest (Oregon and Washington). Depending on how you define Northwest.
Oh my god. It was FOUR:D