Political Region Test

[angus]

That was interesting as well.  I got the following result:

#1   Pacific Coast / Hawaii

#2   Rocky Mountain / Alaska

#3   Mid Atlantic

#4   NYC / New England

#5   Desert Southwest

#6   South Atlantic

#7   Upper Mid-west

#8   Upstate New York

#9   Border States: Virginia, Tennessee & Kentucky

#10   Deep South

#11   Texas

#12   Peripheral South

#13   Rust Belt

what was particularly interesting is that I have lived in many of these regions, and the *only* region in which I have ever lived where the people generally vote as I do is California.  That is, I have noticed other places I've lived (e.g., Massachusetts and Texas) I vote as the locals do sometimes, but not usually, and in fact am rarely in agreement with the locals on a majority of issues.  But in CA I found that, statewide, I almost always voted on the Yes/No questions in a way that I was in the majority.  In fact, on a few ocassions, I voted with the majority on every single yes/no question on the ballot when I lived in CA.  (Not on elected offices though, only on the yes/no questions.)  Also, I agree that Rust Belt, based on what I can remember about the voters there, would be on the bottom of my list.  So, given that the test puts Pacific on top and Rust belt on bottom, I'd give the test a score of accurate overall, in terms of selecting a "political region" that matches my own politics.

[angus]

In some ways, I still like Massinc's Commonwealth Project ten regions more, in terms of dividing the country into regions based on voting proclivities. 




although clearly they haven't updated it since 2000, as promised

http://www.massinc.org/index.php?id=110&pub_id=1618

But for the purposes of giving a test and boxing you according to your answers to several questions and determining matches, I like this 13-region thing better, since it separates the pacific west from Back East.  What it doesn't do, is separate New England, Pennsylvania, or Florida into the radically different political regions like the Commonwealth Project does.  For example, Miami and Destin are put into the same "peripheral south" even though the combination of caribbean immigrants and new york jews in the former have different priorities than the condo owners and sunworshipping residents of Destin and Panama City, most of whom hail from Georgia and Alabama.