Analysis
In the context of the Jesusland map, the states in which a majority voted Democratic in the 2004 election are viewed as more socially liberal in outlook, and therefore having more cultural similarities with Canada than with the remainder of the United States. The Republican-voting red states tended to vote based more on socially conservative positions commonly associated with religious beliefs, such as opposition to same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research. Holders of these values are characterized by a high degree of faith in Evangelical Christianity, thus causing the name of Jesus to be affixed to the hypothetical country; in an article by Ron Suskind of the New York Times, a Republican official characterized the divide as being one between a "faith-based community" and a "reality-based community".
The gap is seen as stark enough that some Democratic bloggers have sarcastically or semi-seriously advocated secession, while some on the Republican side (such as Mike Thompson, a past chairman of the Florida American Conservative Union) suggested that the federal government expel twelve blue states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.
In 2008, Nebraska's 2nd congressional district (NE2) and several of the states that had given their vote to Bush in 2004 - Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, New Mexico, Ohio, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia - gave their votes to the Democratic candidate Barack Obama. Four of these states (Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, North Carolina) and NE-2 had no border with any of the 2004 blue states.
The type of electoral map seen in 2004 is historically unusual: the last three occasions on which a major party's votes occupied a continuous region with no 'holes' were 1980, 1940, and 1936. None were nearly as close as the 2004 election, in which a Democratic victory in Ohio or some combinations of Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa and Colorado would have won them the presidency. Bush's two election victories were the first Republican victories in history to occur without the votes of a single West Coast state or the New England state of Vermont.
Following the 2012 election, the area described as Jesusland is fully contiguous having all Republican states, except for the state of Alaska, being adjacent to each other in terms of the presidential electoral map. All states lying outside of the area are adjacent to one another, Canada, Mexico, and/or coastal waters.
Read more about this topic: Jesusland Map
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