The Electoral Map

CQ Weekly suspects that the Northeast could still be “fertile ground” for Democrats.

The Northeast, which has long stood out as the nation’s least conservative region, produced the biggest bonanza for the Democrats in their surge to a House majority last year: 11 of the 30 seats the party took from the GOP were in the [...]

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Indiana has been as red as the Hoosiers’ jerseys for 40 years, but a new Indianapolis Star poll suggests the state might be “thinking blue.”

Disillusioned with President Bush’s handling of the war, the economy and immigration, nearly half of likely voters in Indiana appear poised to buck 40 years of tradition and vote for a [...]

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It’s easy to divide North America into red and blue, or Jesusland and the United States of Canada as one popular map described it in 2004. It’s also easy to cast the New Continent as a melting pot or as one big purple state of mixed identities. But both of those descriptions are [...]

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I’m off for Thanksgiving to Kane County, Ill., which is Chicago’s version of our Loudoun County in Virginia.  For those of you who don’t know Loudoun, it’s a county where subdivisions and strip malls have quickly replaced farmland in the last 15 years.
Kane is also the easternmost county in retiring former Speaker Dennis Hastert’s 14th [...]

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The SideTrack reminds us that CQ has released its 2008 House landscape maps. As an alumni of National Journal, the Electoral Map won’t give CQ too much praise, but these are damn fine maps.
And if you’re looking for a great resource to supplement these maps and tell the story behind each district, the absolutely [...]

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It was fun while it lasted, but it looks like voters have had enough. “Citing exhaustion, an overcrowded field of candidates, and little hope of making a difference in 2008, roughly 300 million Americans announced Tuesday that they will be leaving the presidential race behind,” the Onion joked last week.
It looks like election fatigue cuts [...]

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Our friend Conn Carroll at The Hotline’s Blogometer has a pretty good guess. He writes:

“Looking at RonPaulGraphs.com’s instant Per Capita Donors (donors per million in population) map, however, we were struck by how closely Paul’s strongest donor states matched up with those where the federal government owns more than 25% of all land. Is [...]

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I’m off to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to bag my first geese of the season, but I have a few posts slated for Sunday.
In the meantime, here’s some great weekend reading:

Wall Street Journal: “Affluent Voters Switch Brands”
 John Mercurio wonders, is the GOP primary turning into an a la carte affair, in which each of [...]

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Arkansas is often a forgotten state. Its six electoral votes are the fewest of any state in the South and it’s the smallest state west of the Mississippi River. “Arkansas is the land left over when Louisiana and Missouri were carved out of the Louisiana Purchase and what is now Oklahoma was fenced [...]

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It’s that time of year again. Ninety-five percent of Congress puts in for earmarks, Ted Stevens and John Murtha request something absurd and John McCain gets a guy to dress up like a pig at the anti-pork press conference. It’s a time honored Washington tradition.
This year, most of the news has to do [...]

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