Cracking the Left's Fortresses

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Check out one of those maps of the county-by-county results for a recent presidential election. The Democrat counties are in blue, and (perversely) the Republican counties are in red. What you will see, no matter the year, are islands of blue engulfed by a sea of red.

The typical interpretation is that the islands of blue are the urban areas where all the people live, and the seas of red are the rural areas where all the rubes live. But that is not the real story these maps tell.

Yes, the blue counties are more urban and populous. They are politically dominated by African Americans, more recent Hispanic immigrants, younger single people, government employees, and welfare dependents. If these groups were not overwhelmingly Democratic, there would be no Democrat party.

But the most salient point about these enclaves of blue is not that they are populous, but that they are virtually monolithic. Democrats win many of the blue counties with 70, 75, or 80 percent of the vote. That is how the urban islands of blue match the surrounding seas of red.

The opinions in these urban fortresses creep out into less monolithic but still predominantly Democrat suburbs, which reflect the pervasive left/liberal media of those areas. But these urban fortresses that make a political difference are surprisingly few: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, the Miami to West Palm Beach corridor, New England. (Other towns like Atlanta present the same urban core and extremist media, but they don't swing their entire states as a result.)

This concentration of the liberal/left vote is a vulnerability, not a strength. If their wins in these strongholds can be reduced just from around 80-20 to something along the lines of 60-40, the Democrats would cease to be a nationally competitive party. Maintaining such culturally monolithic majorities requires keeping alternative ideas out and demonized. Tough to do in a still (for now) free country, with aggressive conservative advocates.