As of this writing, an astounding 1,282 Kossacks have responded to the
"Where are you from?" poll. (Yikes, I sound like a Blog for America poster writing that!) Anyhow, I wrote an e-mail to the map's creator, Robert David Sullivan, to let him know about the thread, since it produced some great discussion.
He was kind enough to write back with some answers to our questions. I just think this sort of feedback is very cool, so go ahead and check out what he has to say.
(He also posted his thoughts at the bottom of the original thread here, plus some other comments here and here.)
Thanks for all the comments on "Beyond Red & Blue." We're having a lot of fun at CommonWealth reading them. I'll try to answer specific questions as my work schedule permits, but I did want to respond in general to the excellent questions about why certain places were placed in certain regions.
One reason is that I wanted to make all 10 regions as close in voting strength as possible, so there was a limit to how many counties I could squeeze into, say, the Northeast Corridor. In some cases, this meant making some tough decisions -- for example, putting Montgomery County, Maryland, into the Northeastern Corridor and Prince George's County, Maryland into Southern Lowlands. I did this because Montgomery is more favorable toward Northern candidates like Paul Tsongas (who carried it in the 1992 presidential primary) and Prince George's is more favorable toward Southern candidates (Bill Clinton beat Tsongas there in 1992).
Another reason is that I didn't put counties into a seemingly compatible region if those counties couldn't really sway a statewide election. For example, Gary, Indiana, is really a Great Lakes city, but it has little or no impact on Indiana politics. You just can't win Indiana by concentrating on Gary instead of the more identifiably Farm Belt parts of the state, so it's sort of raising false hopes to count it as part of the Great Lakes region. There are similar "captive counties" in other states. For example, a few South Dakota counties are among the most Democratic in the nation, because of their high numbers of Native American voters, but they can't swing the state one way or the other.
Finally, there are a few places, like Hawaii, that are so different from everywhere else that they just don't fit neatly into any region. I put Hawaii in with El Norte partly because it has such a large non-white population but also because it seems more liberal on economic issues than on cultural and foreign-policy issues, which is the inverse of Upper Coasts. That may change -- the election of Republican Saiki as governor is certainly a step toward Upper Coasts politics -- and if it does, I would think about moving the state to another region.