156 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Today Americans casually invoke “red and blue
America” as a shorthand for the polarization that
seems to have infected far more than national
elections. Yet political partisanship has a long history
in America, and reached one of its peaks in the late
nineteenth century. Sectional and party divisions
endured long after the end of Reconstruction,
inflamed by debates over temperance, Catholicism,
and the tariff. In the Gilded Age, these issues drove
voters to the polls at rates that have never been
matched since.
High voter turnout led to competitive elections,
among the closest of which was the 1880 presidential
race between Republican James Garfield and
Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock. Garfield’s slim
majority was both visualized and analyzed in this
innovative electoral map, issued in 1883 by Henry
Gannett, superintendent of the census. As one of
the first efforts to picture electoral returns at the
local level, the map stunned viewers and challenged
conventional political wisdom.
The map showed a nation organized according
to prevailing Democratic and Republican majorities.
(Note that while current conventions represent
Democrats in blue and Republicans in red, here
those colors are reversed. Moreover, in the 1880s the
parties represented very different agendas than they
do today.) Garfield’s razor-thin margin of just 7,000
votes is graphed along the bottom of the page. Yet
the electoral college was designed by the framers
so that slim popular majorities such as Garfield’s
translate into wide electoral margins, even landslides.
To highlight this incongruity, Gannett presented his
readers with two maps shown here: an inset devoted
to statewide electoral outcome and a much larger
map profiling the results of individual voting districts.
On the inset map at lower right, the country
appears deeply divided along a north–south axis,
with Democrats dominating the South after defeating
Republican Reconstruction governments. Though
these statewide electoral returns determined the
RED AND BLUE AMERICA
“Popular Vote: Ratio of Predominant to
Total Vote, by Counties ... 1880,” 1883