The Appalachian trail to the presidency
Revisiting Colin Woodard's "American Nations" and how differences between them will be primary in this presidential election.
I don’t really do politics here unless they touch directly on the game of football. I’m not interested in doing a partisan or even politics-driven commentary and probably most of y’all don’t want to read it. Not here at least.
That said, there’s a huge overlap between presidential elections and a favorite concept of mine that comes up here regularly, Colin Woodard’s American Nations which I described in the article below:
America's nations and their favorite war game
During this last 2022 football season I read a book which had a profound impact on how I think about this country’s history and regional dynamics..
Woodard’s concept is that America has 11 distinctive “nations” or regional cultures, developed by the folks who initially settled a region and achieved the “first effective settlement” which then assimilated later comers into the established culture.
The more I’ve learned about this and early American history (pre Revolution) the more essential I think this concept is to understanding the United States and all of its political and regional quirks.
Leading into this election, I took the county-by-county map above and broke several American states down by nation, starting with my home state of Texas. First I tallied which counties in Texas belonged to which nation so I could use county level voting totals in 2020 to see how each “nation” in Texas voted in the presidential election. After seeing those results, I ended up doing the same for numerous states across the country. Particularly the ones with multiple nations.
Now I’m going to drop an enormous data dump on any of you who care to read past the jump and suggest there’s a particular culture (guess which one?) likely to define the upcoming 2024 election.
