The Purple Map

My parents live in a blue house. (Really! It’s blue! Has been for decades!) I live in a blue house too, though on a house-by-house proportional map of my county’s voting patterns, it would be drawn pretty small—dwarfed, no doubt, by the red house occupied by my former (hallelujah!) state legislator and his extensive extended family.

Okay, okay, I admit it: I’ve been obsessing over the string of ever-more-nuanced maps charting the 2004 U.S. presidential election that have been marching across my computer screen. You know the maps I mean: the red state/blue state map that was followed by the red county/blue county map—that, in turn, was followed by the proportionate red county/blue county map (which sized counties according to their populations). At the rate this is progressing, I figure it won’t be that long before I’m able to pull up, right on my computer screen, a map that shows blue and red precincts in my state. I’m sure the only thing preventing the creation of that map actually showing my blue house up the road from my former representative’s red one is that quaint old custom we call the privacy of the voting booth.

But in the midst of all this blue-state-red-state chatter, I was elated to come upon the purple map, which colors counties anything from true blue to true red, based on the percentages of voters going Democrat or Republican, respectively. This map shows—surprise, surprise—that most of the country is purple. True, some parts of the country are what my Crayola box called red violet, while others are definitely blue violet, but the map shows on the micro level what we already knew to be true macroscopically; the race was close, and it was close in a lot of the country.

Close, that is, even in many of those large, mainly rural states whose residents are currently being vilified by members of the purportedly progressive press—blue individuals who are trotting out anti-rural clichés at a rate not seen since Hee Haw went off the air. Never mind that a house-by-house map of many rural counties deep in the heart of Redland would show nearly as many blue houses as red ones; to those who see the country in terms of the Metro: Blue/Retro: Red divide, those blue voters in Kansas and Nebraska are inconsequential, irrelevant—nonexistent, for all practical purposes. Purple? What purple?

As a rural resident of a rural state—albeit a blue one—I’ve been taking this anti-rural vitriol mighty personally. I am deeply frustrated by the willingness of liberal, progressive and radical commentators to write off—in broad, angry, sometimes profanity-laden strokes—entire regions of the country. Their willingness to resort to petty, mean-spirited clichés about rural and small town people—clichés of the sort that no self-respecting progressive would tolerate, were they made about a racial or ethnic minority, or about queers or disabled folks. Their willingness to ignore crucial exceptions to the “rule” that “rural areas all went for Bush” (never mind, apparently, Maine, or the counties in South Dakota that are home to Indian reservations, or the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, or the Black Belt of the South—some of the bluest places in the country). And, most of all, their willingness to ignore the moral of the Purple Map—that most regions of the country are very closely (deeply?) divided. Translation: there’s a pile of blue voters out in in Rural Stupidland.

But while I’ve been comforting myself with the fact that my progressive compatriots are guilty of simplistic overgeneralization when they ignore the many, many “blue” voters in all but the reddest of red counties, nevertheless, when you come right down to it, my comfort is a shallow one. Because, while there might be purple states, counties, cities even houses, there aren’t really purple voters. People either voted for Kerry or they voted for Bush, or they voted for one of those third party candidates who don’t even get a pixel of color on any map. So even if I can be assured that many people even in the heart of rural Kansas or Nebraska voted for Democrats, eventually this tactic of looking at ever-smaller segments of the population will run out, for eventually, our map would have to be drawn at the level of the individual voter. And we voters—all of us—are one solid color.

But wait; is that true? That is, while we all had to assign one hundred percent of our vote to a single candidate, it nevertheless is not at all true that the minds of those voters (whose votes, if we could make a map of the entire population of the country, would appear as individual dots of blue or red, not as swirls of purple in varying shades) are uniformly, firmly, or even committedly blue or red. Indeed, many of them might have been largely some other color altogether—green, if the students in my classes are any indication, or maybe silver (what color would YOU make the libertarians?). A friend told me about one of her students who was ardently pro-Bush—and ardently pro-choice. (My friend pointed out to her that this was Not a Winning Combination.) While I think the student would be hard pressed to justify her position, that’s not the point of my example. My point is that, when it comes down to it, many people have a mind that is a much more complex array of colors than would be indicated by their all-or-nothing choice of a presidential candidate. (We complain about the electoral college? Hell, as far as I’m concerned, my own individual vote has all the flaws of the electoral college. Bring me proportional voting!) Frankly, my mind doesn’t have much blue in it at all. (I’d rush to add that I don’t think it has a single pixel of George Bush Red either.) I didn’t vote for John Kerry because I BELIEVED in him; I voted for John Kerry because he has a long head. Oh, whoops, I mean because I wanted to defeat Bush. I am not a Blue Person, no matter what my dot on the map shows.

Before the election, I was talking with some friends about what we were going to do, if “we” lost the election. (We people-voting-for-the-blue-guy.) Several of us agreed that the only thing we could do—the only thing that gave us any hope whatsoever—was to try to begin, on the local level, to have serious, sustained (hard, awkward, infuriating, depressing, heartening, surprising) conversations with our “red” neighbors, colleagues, fellow citizens. As I look at the maps, and reflect on my own rainbow-hued psyche, I can’t help but feel that we in the purple zones—the vast stretches of the country (rural, yes, but also urban) in which the voting record of the population is the most evenly divided, the stretches in which it is frankly impossible to have “only blue friends”—have the greatest opportunities, the most chances to effect genuine change, of anyone.