Fun with Geography

One of the problems Republicans have is that they aren't as perceptive as they need to be. They've convinced themselves that their insane political views represent those of the vast majority of Americans, despite all evidence to the contrary. I think a lot of their illusions are produced by those electoral college maps that identify Republican states in red, and Democratic states in blue. After every presidential election the map looks like somebody spilled a bucket of blood on it; there are huge swaths of bright red across the Dixie states and the prairie states west of the Mississippi. The blue states, in contrast, are represented by little blue smears on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and around the Great Lakes.

Today while I was out walking the three miles, I decided to do some research when I got home. I chose eight of those bright red states that run down the middle of the map and compared voting data from the last presidential election to the size of the state in acres. The numbers represent the 2008 Republican voters in each state, their percentage of the total vote, and the total acreage in each state, rounded to the nearest tenth of one million acres. The states are listed in order of their GOP-ness. When I feel like it, I'll calculate an average number of acres per GOP voter in these eight states. 

STATE       GOP VOTERS   PERCENT      ACRES

WYOMING      160,639       65.2   62.2 million
UTAH         555,497       62.9   54.4 million
IDAHO        400,989       61.5   57.1 million
NEBRASKA     446,039       57.0   49.2 million
KANSAS       685,541       56.8   52.7 million
NO. DAKOTA   168,523       53.3   44.2 million
SO. DAKOTA   203,019       53.2   49.4 million
MONTANA      241,816       49.7   94.1 million