A 'vox blogoli' response to Jonathan Rouch.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the platform;

Jonathan, I learned early on that when someone insults you or gives you a back handed compliment and then says "just kidding" when you confront him, that person has just told you exactly what he thinks.

My two cents: "Better they [religious conservatives] should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics" is not a sentence I would have included if I had thought harder about it. It shows carelessness on my part, always blameworthy in a writer.

Your remarks do not show carelessness, they show your unconscious bias and prejudice towards Christian Conservatives. I have read your piece in full and have come away with many more questions than answers. Here are few.

The 2004 post-election maps, which looked almost identical to the 2000 ones, further entrenched the conventional wisdom, to the point where most newspaper readers can recite the tropes: red America is godly, moralistic, patriotic, predominantly white, masculine, less educated, and heavily rural and suburban; blue America is secular, relativistic, internationalist, multicultural, feminine, college educated, and heavily urban and cosmopolitan. Reds vote for guns and capital punishment and war in Iraq, blues for abortion rights and the environment. In red America, Saturday is for NASCAR and Sunday is for church. In blue America, Saturday is for the farmers' market (provided there are no actual farmers) and Sunday is for The New York Times . An odd thing, however, happened to many of the scholars who set out to map this culture war: they couldn't find it. If the country is split into culturally and politically distinct camps, they ought to be fairly easy to locate. Yet scholars investigating the phenomenon have often come back empty-handed.

Where did these scholars look?

If you want to find the red state/blue state phenomenon you may look no further than Yolo County. A largely agricultural county near Sacramento, it is also home to UC Davis. The people's republic of Davis as we call it here in the country is not as 'progressive' as say UC Berkeley, but it is cobalt blue. Some 7 miles away is the City of Woodland, population 50,000 or so. The 62,000 folks in Davis voted for John Kerry in 51 of 52 the precicts. In Woodland, George W Bush carried 16 of the 29 precicts. President Bush won the vote in Woodland by a 53% - 47% margin, very close to the national average. In Davis, well let's say they will host the winter Olympics in Hell when Davis goes republican. Thanks to the liberals in Davis, Yolo County goes blue.

To Mr. Rouch's point that it is just a political divide and not a cultural one, a dark blue Davis resident has nothing in common with the construction worker or cattle rancher from the Capay Valley. Likewise the construction worker isn't going to the gay pride day march or the earth day celebrations in Davis. In my County, 20 miles may just as well be 2,000 miles. Take any Davis student or professor and transplant them to the east village and they would be very comfortable. Take that same person and transplant them to a cattle branding on a ranch just a few miles away and they would go into shock and run screaming as fast as their Birkenstocks could carry them.

Two different worlds in the same County.

As for your claim of independent voter status, I will tell you for whom I voted in the past 5 presidential elections, will you?
I'll wager you lunch at the best (only) restaurant in town that we have not voted for the same candidate once.