Quote Originally Posted by Col Forbin View Post
I agree with you on NY and CA, however, they do have very concentrated populations.

Maybe the term "landslide" was a little much, however in terms of electoral votes - it was a pretty steep margin of victor. On the other hand, when looking at all of the demographic and categorical breakdown of voters (age, race/ethnicity, religion, education, and income) - Obama had a larger percentage of votes in all of those categories, except only two (whites, and over 65 - both of which were by extremely narrow margins). I think it says a great deal about his popularity. It was not one or two demographic groups, he won the popular vote in almost every statistical category.
The point is, he should've won by a landslide. With all the TV networks except FOX in his corner by a 7 to 3 margin, 3/4 of a billion dollars to spend (7 mil for the first political infomercial in history), the economy going sour, and an unpopular war, he still only got 52%. If you shaded in actual land mass of who won what, I'd bet it would show Obama winning most of the large cities with inner city populations and thus a smaller area overall, while most of the rest of America voted McCain.

New York state is a microcosm of the country really. I spent a summer building IT systems for a paper concern in Syracuse once, and the people out in the state's interior had no love for NY City. Because of it's superior numbers of people, the city sponges much of the state's tax money and forces their liberal ideaology on the rest of a fairly conservative state.