I was planning on picking up a Primanti Brothers sandwich and eating it in the grandstands of Aliquippa High School Stadium — aka The Pit.

What else do I need to see when I’m in the area?

For those of you unfamiliar with Aliquippa, here’s a summary:

Aliquippa, about 20 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, was just one of many burgs built to process all that ore and coal wrested out of the hills, one more town full of people from Eastern and Southern Europe who kept the coke ovens fired and the stacks smoking 24 hours a day, 13,000 workers filling three daily shifts on the other side of the Aliquippa Tunnel. Jones & Laughlin Steel designed and built the town just after 1900 and divided it into 12 ethnically specific “plans,” separating labor from management, hunkies from cake-eaters. But the soot still fell all over, dirtying your shirt collar even if you never set foot in the mill that stretched for seven miles along the Ohio River.

The Aliquippa Works pumped out record tonnages of armor plate, shell forgings, bombs, landing craft, bullets and mortar tubing, proudly shaping the weapons to beat back Hitler and Tojo.

The only exception is that Warren Buffett is eating lunch here and holding court with a group of business school students. Their enthusiasm about being in the company of Buffett only seems to be exceeded by Buffett’s enthusiasm toward his root beer float.

I had the privilege last week to be part of that group, as Mr. Buffett graciously hosted a contingent of my fellow students from Georgetown McDonough School of Business for a Q&A at Berkshire Hathaway and a lunch at Piccolo Pete’s.

Buffett knows this neighborhood well. As a kid in the 1940s, he would help his dad, a Republican congressman, campaign on this side of town. Union households were common here, and according to the definite Buffett book The Snowball, Rep. Howard Buffett would often get into trouble for his staunch anti-Roosevelt votes.

Today, Warren Buffett is a strong supporter of the president who has been tagged with creating a “New New Deal.” Indeed, one major reason why Barack Obama won Omaha was because of Buffett’s endorsement in May, 2008.

“I will be very happy if he is elected President,” Buffett said at the time. “He is my choice.”

Obama managed to win Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, which is essentially Omaha and its suburbs. Thanks to the state’s proportional vote system, he won one of Nebraska’s electoral votes. It was the first time ever that the loser of the state picked off a vote.

Buffett on Public Policy and the Economy

Buffett seems bullish about the economy, which will surely be the pivotal issue in Obama’s reelection campaign.

Sipping on one of the six Cokes that he consumes per day, Buffett remarks more than once that “American is wired for success.” He notes that standard of living has increased six-fold in his lifetime while the value of the dollar has decreased 94% (increasing purchasing power).

He hints support of policymaker’s loosening of money — “If I owe you a thousand Warrenbucks, I want those to be worth less in the future” — and pulls out a $100 trillion Zimbabwean note from his wallet to make a point that we are a long way from destructive inflation.

He seems concerned, but not worried about public debt.

Even though Buffett did not vote for George W. Bush, he credits his administration and particularly Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke from averting disaster in the late 2008. “The dominoes were lined up like you wouldn’t believe,” he recounts, warning that even Goldman, Sachs could have fallen. Berkshire ended up laying down $15 billion in 25 perilous days.

Buffett voices support for TARP, a measure often incorrectly pinned on the Obama administration, but hints that the government loan to GM was foolish. “If horses could vote, there would be no tractors,” he jokes, noting that Congress felt cornered to help GM after bailing out the likes of Citi and Fannie.

Even though he is valued at a reported $47 billion, Buffett still drives his own Cadillac to his office in non-descript 14-story office building on the outskirts of town. He is one of the brightest minds in America, but is still very much a product of Omama.

Buffett’s Kind of Town

This is a traditional town whose boom period was the 1880s, a couple of decades after Abraham Lincoln designated it as the eastern terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Built on the bluffs cut through millennia by the Missouri River, Omaha has always been a town of stockyards and steaks. Jack Kerouac wrote about “the first cowboy I saw” upon entering Omaha, “walking along the bleak walls of the wholesale meat warehouses in a ten-gallon hat and Texas boots.”

Its home to Leo’s Diner, which serves the best breakfast sandwich of my lifetime: Thick-cut bacon, a sausage patty, hash browns, eggs, and American cheese on thick-cut wheat bread.

Economically, its five Fortune 500s are reflection of what it does best: Berkshire Hathaway (conservative value investing), Mutual of Omaha (insurance), Union Pacific (railroads), Kiewit (contracting), and ConAgra (agribusiness).

Politically, its residents espouse a conservatism that has helped make Nebraska the second reddest state in presidential elections in the last 50 years, behind only Utah, according to The Almanac.

Omaha is the kind of town that hosts the College World Series. It’s also Big XII city clad in Husker red, and no conference was more pro-Bush than the Big XII. Bush swept the seven states that have a Big XII school the way Obama won the eight states in the Big Ten.

Interestingly, now the Huskers are joining their neighboring Hawkeyes in the Big Ten.

So can Obama win Nebraska’s 2nd District again?

Obamaha in 2012?

In his book How Barack Obama Won, Chuck Todd makes the point that the Obama camp played to win in Omaha. “What did the Obama folks prove: half of politics is showing up and the Obama campaign showed up in Omaha, while the McCain campaign did not.”

Obama will surely have enough money to spend in 2012, and it will spend plenty in Omaha trying to reach Iowa voters across the river. In 2008, Obama spent over $628,000 in TV ads in this market. So from their perspective, it makes sense to target Nebraska’s 2nd again.

But Omaha strategist Solomon Kleinsmith, who founded the local grassroots group Omaha for Obama in 2007, doesn’t think he’ll win it again.

“This district leans right, because it includes a rural area south of town (the city is pretty evenly split), so for a Democrat to win they have to get all the Democrats, make the North Omaha Black Community come out in droves, South Omaha Latinos show up, and also get a comfortable majority of the swing vote,” Kleinsmith says. “I just don’t see that happening this next time around.”

African-Americans account for 9.6% of the district’s population while Latinos account for 8.6%. Assuming he wins 95% of blacks and 65% of Latinos (my own predictions), my calculations shows that he would need to win 42% of whites in the 2nd District to win.

He won 39% of whites in all of Nebraska in 2008. I don’t have data for each congressional district within the state, but I imagine his share of the white vote was much higher in Omaha.

Race is about the only voting metric that I have data on, and by this quantitative measure, the odds look long for Obama. Qualitatively, it also looks like even more of a long shot. Even Klinesmith, founder of Omaha for Obama says, “I’ve been pretty disappointed with his presidency.”

But if the Obama team is good at one thing, it’s running a masterful campaign. He’s also got Buffett in his corner, who during our Q&A at Berkshire, warned against predicting the future. “I talked with Bill Gates about the Internet in 1994, and I couldn’t predict how it would end up having value for GEICO,” he said about one of his marquis holdings.

So maybe Obama will pull it off.  I’m not sure I’d put too much money on it.

Most Americans would agree that Richmond is a southern town, but how far north above the capital of the Confederacy does the South extend?  Is Fredericksburg a southern town?  Annapolis?  Harper’s Ferry?  Louisville?

In some sense it’s a ham-handed question since “the South” has many sub-cultures.  Charleston is very different than Dallas; the Great Smokies look nothing like the Delta; and Lexington-style barbecue is sacrilegious in Memphis.  But at the same time, most Americans, southern and otherwise, have an psychological concept of the South.  The question is the geography of it.

The town of Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley was the base to legendary southerners such as Harry Byrd and Stonewall Jackson, yet it is north of Washington, was settled by Quakers, and has the feel of a Pennsylvania mill town.  Not surprisingly, Winchester changed hands 72 times during the Civil War.

The border is obviously hazy, as anyone familiar with the events of 1861-65 can attest.  The five most widely used borders are the Rappahannock River, the Potomac River, the Ohio River, the Mason-Dixon Line, and U.S. Route 40.  Each of these can seem equally logical and preposterous depending on what kind of metric you’re using.  Here are some of the best ways decide:

Surveys and Censuses

The Mason-Dixon Line is the most traditional border between North and South, and to some extent the line made sense in its time.  Maryland was a slave state, home to the likes of Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, and Lincoln had to send federal troops into Baltimore to quell secessionist riots — all suggesting Maryland was a southern state.

The Line endures today and the U.S. Census still lists Maryland and D.C. as part of the South.  In fact, the Census even calls Delaware southern, which seems a bit misguided.  The concept of the Mason-Dixon Line today is outdated, as few people would describe Baltimore, with its ethnic neighborhoods and industrial tradition, as southern.

Roads

Many historians and sociologists decided long ago that the Mason-Dixon Line was too clumsy and that U.S. Route 40 — the old National Road — was a more accurate border.  The road extends from Baltimore to Frederick to Cumberland, through Wheeling, across southern Ohio, through Columbus and Indianapolis, across southern Illinois, and out to St. Louis.

In the “Nine Nations of North America,” Joel Garreau noted that there are “substantial differences in food, architecture, the layout of towns, and music to either side of that highway.” Southern Indiana, he wrote, “is definitely part of Dixie, and has been ever since the Coppherheads (those Northerners who sympathized with the Confederates in the 1860s).”

Rivers

Gen. George McClellan could never cross the across the swampy Chickahominy River outside Richmond, and so everything south of there is clearly property of Dixie.  But a more frequently-used border is the Rappahannock, which is about halfway between Washington and Richmond.  Most neighborhoods north of the Rap feel metropolitan while counties south are rural.

The Potomac was also the effective border between the USA and CSA.  The Feds’ decision to coin the Army of the Potomac was symbolic, as it hinted at the central point.  Similarly, the Army of the Ohio suggested that the Ohio River was the western border between North and South, which seems reasonable if you consider Kentucky southern and Ohio northern.

Religion

If you look at the Kentucky/Ohio and Kentucky/Indiana borders, you’ll also see that the southern state is overwhelmingly Baptist while the northern one is a mix of Catholics, Methodists, and Presbyterians.  Not surprisingly, the Baptist counties in southern Illinois supported Stephen A. Douglas (who founded a Baptist seminary) over Lincoln, who was a Presbyterian.

The divide roughly follows the Ohio River, but it cuts across West Virginia, where the southern tier is Baptist and speaks will a drawl and the northern tier is ethnic and cheers for the Steelers. Maryland was a colony founded by Catholics, while Virginia is mostly Baptist with a strong Methodist following in the hills.

Language

If religion is voluntary, dialect is involuntary.  Every American knows what a southern accent sounds like, thanks in no small part to southern characterures from Boss Hogg to Larry the Cable Guy.  The reality of course is that the South consists of a fabric of dialects from the mountain twang of Johnson City to the smooth drawl of Panama City.

What those accents have in common, according to Rick Aschmann’s research of regional dialects, is that the South is defined by areas where people pronounce “pen” as “pin.”  The region he defined as “the South” roughly followed the Baptist/Ohio/Potomac border, with differences between Lowland and Inland and distinct pockets in the old world towns of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans.

Food

It’s tough to think about towns like New Orleans without thinking about food and drink, and really no beverage is more southern than sweat tea.  The Post article notes that McDonald’s went national with sweat tea in 2008, but prior to that decision, one of the best ways to measure a location’s southerness was whether or not Mickey D’s served sweat tea.

The map below show the so-called Sweat Tea Line of McDonald’s that served the tasty drink in 2004.  It’s a surprisingly southern border, below Richmond even. The second map is the Slaw Line of West Virginia shows the geographic dispersion of HDJ’s (hot dog joints) that serve with slaw and without (h/t Strange Maps).  Again, the map is similar to the Baptist Line.

Politics

Lastly, no discussion of the South could be complete without an understanding of its politics.  Chuck Todd has said that 2006 was the year that “Virginia seceded from the Confederacy,” and sure enough the Old Dominion and neighboring North Carolina voted for Barack Obama in 2008.  For this reason, we can’t simply look at the recent electoral map.

The best way to measure the South through politics is by examining the “Solid South” of the Wilbur Mills/Sam Rayburn/Willie Talos days in the century following Appamattox.  As recently as 1982, Democrats controlled a near monopoly in states like Alabama (105-4 split in House; 35-0 in Senate), Georgia (157-23, 51-5), and South Carolina (107-17, 41-5).

So Where is the Border?

It follows beings with an imaginary line from Cambridge, Md. to Fredericksburg, Va., follows the Rappahannock River up into the Piedmont, across the Baptist Line in West Virginia, along the Ohio River, and along the Baptist Line in southern Illinois.

Pittsburgh was built on the foundations of Ft. Duquense (French) and Ft. Pitt (British).  In its heyday in the railroad age, the iron ore and coke of the Pennsylvania hills were baked in blast furnaces to produce the steel that built the Union Pacific Railway and Empire State Building.  In 1909, sociologist Paul Kellogg wrote in a report called “The Pittsburgh Survey,” that “in coal and coke, tin plate, glass, cork, and sheet metal … its output is a national asset” (h/t Bill Steigerwald).  Companies like U.S. Steel funded Mellon Bank and PNC Bank, and hotels with ornate masonry arose downtown.

Today, of course, Pittsburgh is a gloomy place with a rough economy and a nearly bankrupt municipality.  Yinzers leave in droves for greener pastures in Charlotte, Atlanta, and Northern Virginia.  Those places have humming economies but definitely lack the character.  Charlotte prospered thanks to the liberalization of state banking laws in the 1960s and 70s, and Northern Virginia boomed in the 1980s and 90s, thanks in part to Beltway Bandits capitalizing on government spending.

Pittsburgh, for all its faults and horrible hockey teams, is a solid city full of people who know how to make things.  Bruce Springsteen might as well been talking about Pittsburgh when he sang in “Youngstown,” “These mills they built the tanks and bombs that won this county’s wars.”  The map below shows the increase in steel production from 1941-45, with Pittsburgh clearly leading, and the second map shows furnaces, rollings mills, and steel works in Pittsburgh in 1879:

State Legislature Split in 1982, measured D-R

State Upper Lower Gov.

Alabama       35-0       105-4        D

Arkansas      34-1        93-7          D

Florida          27-13     81-39        D

Georgia         51-5       157-23       D

Louisiana     39-0       91-10         D

Mississippi   43-4       116-4         D

N. Carolina   40-10     96-24       D

Oklahoma     37-11       73-28       D

S. Carolina    41-5        107-17       D

Texas              24-7       58-39        D

Virginia          31-9       74-25        D

Republicans reclaimed congressional districts from the New Hampshire coast to the swamps of Louisiana to the Iron Range of Minnesota to the Las Vegas suburban desert. Indeed, they won everywhere, but the “whiplash” was stronger in some places than others.

Out of the 435 congressional districts, Democratic candidates underperformed Barack Obama in 83% of districts and overperformed him in 15% (they matched him in the remaining 2%). In an ominous sign for 2012, Democrats ran under Obama’s 2008 margins in every single district in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

To calculate what I call the Whiplash Vote, I measured Obama’s margin of victory in 2008 against each Democratic candidate’s margin in 2010. So, for example, if Obama beat John McCain by 15 points in Virginia’s 11th district (57%-42%), and Gerry Connolly and Keith Fimian essentially tied two years later (49.3%-48.6%), the Whiplash Vote there is -15.

Interestingly, Democrats outpreformed Obama in many districts in the South and West and still lost. Blue Dog Jim Marshall went down to defeat in Georgia’s 8th by six points to Austin Scott (53%-47%), but Obama had lost by 13 points in the district — therefore, the Whiplash was a positive +7.

The most extreme Whiplash was in Florida’s 21st, where McCain edged Obama by two points in 2008, but where Democrats failed to field a candidate in 2010. That led to a Whiplash of -98 (the difference between -2 and -100), which of course is an aberration but nonetheless stunning.

On the other side of the spectrum, Democrat Dan Boren beat his opponent by 14 points in Oklahoma’s 2nd, which was 46 points better than Obama’s 32 point deficit there.

The full map is below. I created it using a fantastic product called Google Fusion Tables where you can visualize data (like election results) on Google Maps. If you click on each district, you can view the Whiplash. Dark red signifies a Whiplash of over 14 points, medium red is 6-13 points, and light red is 0-5 points.

Here is a link to the interactive map.

I thought that the Big Ten would be Democrats’ worst region, and they did indeed lose a massive 21 seats in the eight states that constitute that conference.  But they also lost a net 15 seats in the eight states of SEC Country, and bled 20 in the 11 states that made up the old Confederacy.

In the West, where Democrats have made significant gains in recent years, Republicans flipped seven seats.  And even in the Northeast, which has become as solidly blue as anywhere in America, Democrats lost the better part of a dozen.  Across the nation, rural Democrats felt the most pain, and over half of the 52 Blue Dogs lost.

Republican governors claimed the executive mansions in the trifecta of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and reclaimed the governors office in the critical battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa.  The GOP also captured the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Senate races and even won in Illinois — which has to sting for Obama.

Indeed, the braintrust at the White House must have a major headache this morning.  Obama promised to scramble the electoral map in 2008, and he delivered, winning red states like Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia, and even claiming one electoral vote in Nebraska.

But Republicans rolled in Indiana’s bellwether Ohio River Valley last night, knocked off 28-year incumbent Rick Boucher in Virginia’s historically Democratic coalfields, recaptured a battleground seat in Hampton Roads, stole a Democratically-gerrymandered seat in North Carolina’s coastal plain, and even won North Carolina’s state House for the first time since 1898.

Those three so-called “blue states” have to be considered “pink” at best, and the White House will probably be better off focusing on holding what they’ve got.

But in 2010, Republican Robert Schilling will beat Democrat Phil Hare by over tens points. Call it a win for Republicans, a loss for gerrymandering.

Tonight, Democrats will lose two seats in Indiana and at least three in Virginia (and possibly a fourth in NOVA). Republicans won in the bellweather Ohio River Valley in Indiana, knocked off 28-year incumbent Rick Boucher in the coalfields in Virginia, and recaptured a seat that Obama won in Hampton Roads.

The White House cannot be happy about the results in these two states. Obama must have known that it would difficult to defend these two battlegrounds in 2012, but the elections tonight show that Virginia and Indiana are two “blue states” that have to be considered at least pink in 2012.

Here’s a screen shot from the NYT map:

I’m a Virginian, so I’m very interested in a couple of races in the Old Dominion, where polls close at 7 pm (EST).  Tom Perriello is sure to lose his Southside and Charlottesville district, but the question is by how much?  He was the only House member that Obama stumped for and he was the benefit of a flood of liberal money and support.

I’ll also be watching 28-year incumbent Rick Boucher in the southwest part of the state.  He’s a great fit for the district and is a master of constituent relations, so if he falls, then we can probably expect Democratic losses on the high end.

At 7:30, I’ll check to see if Joe Manchin can pull off a win in the West Virginia Senate race.  If he wins, then Democrats effectively hold the Senate.

Also at 7:30, Ohio polls close.  Like many election, the Buckeye State is the premier battelground with at least five incumbent Democratic representatives and incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland on the hot seat.

And at 8:00 pm, my eyes will be trained on Pennsylvania, which has five Democratic members of the House in danger and also features a Senate race that is likely to be a photo finish.

By 9:00 pm, most of those returns will have become public, and I think we’ll have a good indication of the score in this election.  Of course, there are nearly 100 House seats in play and dozens of governors and Senate seats, so we’ll have massive amounts of returns to analyze.

Keep this map with you throughout the night as a reference to when the polls close:

The map is also embeddable on you blog with this code: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/theelectoralmap/5136055605/” title=”Poll Closing Times, 2010 Elections by TheElectoralMap.com, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4019/5136055605_d2ff67c778.jpg” width=”500″ height=”373″ alt=”Poll Closing Times, 2010 Elections” /></a>