Just on a lark I wanted to see how household usage of the internet, in and out of the house, broke down by state. I found a pdf at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration wesbite that broke down the numbers using census data from October of 2007. And I noticed an interesting correlation.
If the percentage of the state's population that did not use the internet at all was more than 32.60%, then that state voted for McCain in the election. Here are the top 10 states in the United States that have the largest percentage of residents with no Internet exposure.
- West Virginia: 41.80%
- Mississippi: 40.27%
- Alabama: 39.39%
- Arkansas: 38.02%
- Louisiana: 36.85%
- Oklahoma: 36.31%
- Tennessee: 34.15%
- Kentucky: 33.33%
- South Carolina: 33.25%
- Missouri: 32.69%
Every last one of those states voted for John McCain. You also may notice another interesting similarity between these states and
that map we've all seen recently (I borrowed the image url from another user b/c I can't upload images from my station. Sorry!)
Excepting South Carolina and Missouri, the rest of the states are all firmly within the "belt" where the GOP actually expanded their vote. So what does this mean?
It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from a couple of data points. But I believe that this is indicative of the kind of voter that makes up the GOP base; a low-information voter than has limited ability to search for and gather information on their own.
In other words, these people get their world-view from the television, newspaper and talk-radio. They have a limited ability to challenge what they hear or to go and search on their own to determine if what they are reading or hearing is the truth. They are more susceptible to the lies and slander than the Right churns out and the traditional media talks about under the guise of "balance."
I think this also presents an opportunity. The United States is long-overdue in creating a national, high-speed broadband infrastructure to ensure that any citizen, anywhere, can access the Internet either at home or at school, a library or other public building. If we have that national access, maybe the residents in these states will be more likely to use the Internet. And maybe more of those red spots will turn blue.
If you were curious about the other end of the spectrum, only eight states out of the thirty with non-usage rates under 30% voted for McCain. Three of those states had ties to the campaign (Arizona and Alaska) or the current administration (Wyoming). Two of them are just dyed in red (Utah and Kansas). Two more were very competitive and Obama had a shot of winning them (Georgia and North Dakota). And the last state, Nebraska, actually gave Obama one of its electoral votes.