The relatively unremarkable, but moderately interesting map of the “Cotton Belt” transposed with the 2008 county-by-county election results (hint: it looks the same for 2000, 2004, and probably any Democratic losing state-wide races) was posted at Reason’s blog.  And it received this response.:

Err, there are a lot of dot clusters in red counties. Where they happen to coincide are in more densely populated areas, which tend to vote D for unrelated reasons.In other words, if you hadn’t told me what this map was supposed to show, I would have no idea what it was supposed to show.Part of this is smacked down with the comment.:cunnivore – the coincidence of high cotton production and Obama voting (read: majority black citizenry) is not at all limited to high density areas. The delta and the swath of black belt through central Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina are, for the most part, sparsely populated and very rural.

And part of it is a narrowness of vision.  From the vantage point of the nation as a whole, the belt is obvious, even as it has a lot of noise with interceding red areas and even heavy clusters of plantations belted up in red.

But, in the “Martian Observer” insight:  If you were a space alien you might think that the soil content made people black.

And a warning shot from the other line of demarcation I’ve discussed here, the belt where McCain outperformed Bush, in the comments at the American Prospect blog.:

Look, I know there’s a lot of merriment about this stuff with you Washington-based lefties [Where *are* these people? If they’re in the neighborhood, they’re the dirty guys ranting on the streetcorner], but this could be a lot more serious than you think. Here in TN, not only did Obama get creamed, but the Repbulicans won control of the statehouse for the first time since Reconstruction. And one of the Republican state reps, while trying to deny [of course] that it had anything to do with race, said that it more likely was the result of “the Muslim factor” and “many people’s perception that [Obama] was the Antichrist.”
Look–It’s crazy, but I know enough rural people to easily see how this stuff could be believed by perfectly sane people. First of all, you accept the premillennial dispensationalist gospel, so you take the Antichrist stuff seriously. Secondly, this really exotic candidate comes seemingly out of nowhere and wins the election, even though his values don’t line up with yours or those of anyone you know. You don’t trust any of the MSM and rely heavily on your neighbors, your church, and certain sorts of talk radio for understanding of the outside world. The results can be really toxic. Now, to Obama’s credit, his team seems to have understood something of how this works, and made really strong efforts to counter it among white working-class voters in battleground states. But the Obama campaign was virtually invisible in places like Tennessee; indeed, volunteers in Nashville were put to work calling voters in NC.  Frankly, I think the dismissal of this *Newsweek* piece by the left [or, worse, the assertion that it shouldn’t have been published at all, because it somehow lends credence to the notion that we’re a “center-right” nation–how?] says little for its perception. People you ignore or belittle have ways of  suddenly coming back on you; if you’re not clueless about them, it might help you prepare.

One last mapping entity oddity… maybe this is meaningless, but if you run the counties from 95 percent Catholics on back to zero, the trend-lines never really do stabilize, and while it does eventually get reasonably assured in Obama’s favor — the tipping point at 59 percent after some good swings about,  there are wild swings such as to suggest that this is a meaningless demagraphic category – those Hispanic Catholics in the border region of Texas that make up the two most heavily Catholic counties have apparently nothing in common with the third most populous Catholic county in Louisina, who have probably been hearing sermons about the evils of Abortion every week for the past few months.

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