Everyone has been linking to this map, a gallup survey which reveals that Democrats have a clear trump over Republicans in party registration with 29 states and DC, and Republicans only have 5 states.

It’s not really all that interesting in the sense that Democrats held registration advantages through the Nixon and Reagan landslides, thanks to the Solid South forged out of the Civil War.  Maybe there’s a bit of interest in seeing that belt of states which voted for Goldwater, and voted for Thurmond before that, and voted for Wallace after that, and stayed with Stevenson against Eisenhower sticks out in the South — more Republican registrants down there in the Land of Dixiecrats, would have been mildly ironic in the Days of the Solid South.

An exercise I need to look around to see someone doing would be to quantify the percentage differences between percentage for Obama or McCain as against the percentage difference in registration — this would give us a clearer vision of the strength of the Zell Miller Democrats in those parts.  As it were, all this gives us a ranking down in percentages for party identification — Virginia is the last Obama state before it becomes all McCain, semi-appropriately enough considering it was the state that going down the percentages put Obama over the top and which came closest to the national percentage.  But jarring to see next to Oklahoma, which went heavily for McCain, and was part of that notable “Appalachia to Ozarks Belt” where McCain performed better than Bush.  Different types of Democrats, the Northern Virginia DC Suburbanites who have shifted Virginia to a Democratic state and the Oklahoma Democrats who shipped to the Senate two of the biggest Republican loons.

The McCain Belt includes five of these six states: West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma. — the states that don’t quite clump into the Obama at the top, McCain at the Bottom list (well, Oklahoma runs up to the top of the McCain list, but for expediency’s sake I mention it here).  Remember there, Obama lost the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries by forty plus percentage points.

But, the lesson of this gallup survey is that at the moment it seems that only Mormons are willing to call themselves Republicans.  In that “Republican Rump” figuration, it looks like Mitt Romney is going to be the 2012 Republican nominee.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.