That Very Red County Map

... doesn't mean very much at all, and I don't see why we should keep flogging it.

It doesn't matter how many square miles of territory Bush carried. We vote by population, not by acreage. No matter what that map may look like, Kerry took 48% of the vote, and that's what's important. That's a pretty big margin considering the times we live in, but it's still almost fifty-fifty. I think it's unnecessarily insulting to pretend that almost half the public doesn't exist by showing a map that misrepresents the actual division in the country by showing so much red.

[Did you just say something was "unnecessarily insulting"? -- ed. I guess I did. IS THIS SARCASTIC? I DON'T GET IT. -- ed. Trying to be more respectable, for both advertisers, and so that Instapundit will link me. So you're selling out? -- ed. I've been dying to; I see this as my big chance.]

Bush won, and by a fair margin, but that map has nothing to do with anything. I think a lot of us -- including me -- seized upon the visual power of that map (deceptive though it was) after the hotly disputed 2000 election, because we were thrashing about for anything to rebut the fact that Bush had lost the popular vote by a whisker.

But we don't need that crutch any more. Our boy won by 3.6 million or so votes. A football team doesn't have to point to a statistic about how many yards its racked up if its record is a winning one. And ours is, quite undeniably, a winning won. We won the political Super Bowl.

Let the other side carp about yards per carry and turnover differentials. We won the only stat that matters.

Update: The Value of "Respectablity": Having just called "bullshit" on a conservative-friendly prop, I can now call "complete and total bullshit" on this lefty prop -- purpotedly a chart of state-by-state average IQ's, demonstrating, if you had any doubt, that Kerry won all the "smart states."

I doubt that this is accurate -- there are no citations for it whatsoever, a pretty low-IQ move when introducing such a tendentious little prop -- but even if it is, so what? We don't vote according to acreage, and we also don't give extra votes for those who have slightly-above-average IQ's.

If we did, I could have carried New York all by my lonesome. [No you couldn't. You're a moron. -- ed. That's enough of you.]

Let's both sides agree on two things:

Kerry won 48% of the vote.

Bush won 51.5% of the vote.

All the props and charts and pie graphs and, who knows, rubber chicken graphs* in the world are not going to change those two key facts.

Bush won the popular vote. Bush won the electoral vote.

And that's how we keep score, Bubby!**

* Where?

** Where?

Thanks to a poster who I'm not sure if I can name. He knows who he is.

posted by Ace at 03:50 PM

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