Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin’

Look at this map, and notice that deep, deep in the Republican South, there’s a thin blue band stretching from the Carolinas through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. These are the counties that went for Obama in the last election. A blue crescent in a sea of red.


[Don't leave. I know some of you bounced here because my headline was political, and the word "plankton" will send you scuttling back to HuffPo, Politico, and Drudge, where politics is plankton-free. But before you go, check out this next map.]




Then came slavery.

McClain, quoting from Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery, points out, “The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers.” After the Civil War, a lot of former slaves stayed on this land, and while many migrated North, their families are still there.


This, says marine biologist McClain, explains that odd stretch of Obama blue; it’s African-Americans sitting on old soils from ancient organisms that turned sunshine into fertilizer. So plankton remain a force in Southern elections — though not always, not continuously. After the Civil War, when the South voted solidly Democratic and Jim Crow laws ruled, many blacks couldn’t vote, so the pattern disappears. Voting rights laws hadn’t been passed during the Goldwater-Johnson election of 1964, so in this map, the African-American difference is invisible.

But some African-Americans were still there. So was the soil (though it’s not as rich as it once was), and so were the rocks that geologist Steve Dutch “found immediately familiar” because they mapped those ancient shores. All of which is to say, when you cover politics, sometimes, without realizing it, you are also telling rock tales. Geology, every so often, peeks through.

Geologist Steve Dutch’s detailed maps, and careful analysis, come from a study he did of the Bush-Gore election in 2000. He called it “Geology and Election 2000.” You can find that here. “Dr. M” (that’s Craig McClain’s Nom de Blog at “Deep Sea News”) wrote his geology analysis here.
