The Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area: an Exception on the Electoral Landscape of North Florida John W

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2010 The Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area: An Exception on the Electoral Landscape of North Florida John W. McEwen

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COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND PUBLIC POLICY

THE TALLAHASSEE METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA: AN

EXCEPTION ON THE ELECTORAL LANDSCAPE OF NORTH FLORIDA

JOHN W. McEWEN

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Geography in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010

The members of the committee approve the thesis of John W. McEwen defended on November 30, 2009.

______Philip E. Steinberg Professor Directing Thesis

______Lisa Jordan Committee Member

______Mark W. Horner Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Phil Steinberg for helping me out when I needed an advisor and he didn’t need another advisee. It would have been very difficult otherwise. Additional thanks to Ray Oldakowski for support, advice and expertise. Finally, the impetus of this thesis came from John Guthrie and Linc Clay of the Florida Senate Advisory Group on Reapportionment who made myriad data available to me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ……………………………………………….…………………………...v

List of Figures ……………………………………….…………………………………..vii

Abstract …………………………………………….…………………………………….viii

INTRODUCTION .………………………………….………………………………..1

LITERATURE REVIEW: VOTING BEHAVIOR IN THE UNITED STATES ..…………..4

ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY of NORTH FLORIDA …………………………………..13

ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY of the TALLAHASSEE MSA …………………………..32

DISCUSSION and CONCLUSION ..…………………………...…...... 51

BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………………..60

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………..64

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1 – Demographic Makeup of the United States, the South & North Florida …...... 17

Table 3.2a – Educational Attainment for Population Age 25 and Older …………...... 19

Table 3.2b – Median Household Income and Income Levels …………………...... 20

Table 3.2c – Church Membership by Denomination ……………………………………21

Table 3.2d – Population Density (Urban vs. Rural) ...………………….………………22

Table 3.3 – Presidential Support: 1968-2008 ...………………………………………….22

Table 3.4a – Multivariate Regression of Predictive Variables on Republican Vote Share (North Florida) ……………………………………………………………26

Table 3.4b – Intercorrelation of Independent Variables (North Florida) …...………………….28

Table 4.1 – Commuting Among the Tallahassee MSA Counties …………………...... 34

Table 4.2a – Multivariate Regression of Predictive Variables on Republican Vote Share (Tallahassee MSA) ……………………………………………………………37

Table 4.2b – Intercorrelation of Independent Variables (Tallahassee MSA) .…………………38

Table 4.3 – Presidential Support: 1968-2008 .…………………………….……………..40

Table 4.4 – Demographic Makeup of Tallahassee, North Florida & the South ...... 42

Table 4.5a – Educational Attainment of Population Age 25 and Older ..….……………….43

Table 4.5b – Median Household Income and Income Levels ...……….………...... 44

Table 4.5c – Church Membership by Denomination .…………………………...... 45

Table 4.5d – Population Density (Urban vs. Rural) …………………………...... 46

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1 – Cultural Landscape of North Florida ……………………………………………14

Figure 3.2 – Twenty-Seven County Study Area ……………………………………………15

Figure 3.3 – Predicted, Observed and Residual Values for Republican Vote Share for North Florida ……………………………………………………………………29

Figure 4.1a – North Florida and the Tallahassee MSA .………………………...... 32

Figure 4.1b – Counties of the Tallahassee MSA .………………………………...... 33

Figure 4.2 – Predicted, Observed and Residual Values for Republican Vote Share for the Tallahassee MSA ……………………………………………………………48

Figure 5.1 – Tallahassee MSA Republican Vote Share ……………………………………56

Figure 5.2 – County-level Republican Vote Share for the Tallahassee MSA ……………56

Figure 5.3 – Precinct-level Republican Vote Share for the Tallahassee MSA ……………58

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ABSTRACT

The South is a cultural region known for its political, religious and social conservatism. In Florida, this region fully encompasses 27 counties from Northeast Florida to Florida’s western border. This region of the state, known as North Florida, generally exhibits common characteristics of the South regarding levels of adherence to fundamentalist Christianity and political conservatism and, in addition, also supported the Republican presidential candidate in 2000.

The exception in North Florida is the Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area which is comprised of the counties of Gadsden, Leon, Jefferson and Wakulla. The Tallahassee MSA supported the Democratic candidate in the 2000 presidential election.

By comparing descriptive statistics as well as statistical models and maps, this paper explores that anomaly. In addition to studying an anomaly on the electoral landscape of North Florida, this paper includes a brief discussion of the most appropriate way to study this sort of political geography in terms of unit of analysis and scale. The goal is to achieve the optimal unit of analysis in political geography – the individual voter.

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INTRODUCTION

The goal of this thesis is straightforward. Determine why the Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area in North Florida voted for the Democratic presidential candidate while the region of North Florida voted for the Republican candidate. To reach this goal, this thesis will begin by reviewing what demographic and socio-economic variables are strong predictors of voting behavior in the United States. In order to establish a benchmark against which to compare Tallahassee, this paper will then look at two Republican regions and the demographic and socio- economic characteristics of their respective populations.

These steps will allow for an examination of how the demographic and socio-economic variables are related to the different voting outcomes of North Florida and the Tallahassee MSA. This will also lead to answering the questions of whether the variables that explain differences in Republican vote share within North Florida similarly explain differences in Republican vote share in the Tallahassee MSA. Thus a better understanding of a Democratic metropolitan area in the South will be achieved.

In the United States the South is a large, nationally recognized cultural region (Garreau 1981; Zelinsky 1992) that is usually considered to be the former states of the Confederate States of America (Clark and Prysby 2004). In politics and popular knowledge, it is known to be a conservative region that conjures images of segregation, racism, Evangelical Christianity, the Bible Belt (Lamme and Oldakowski 2007) and consistent support of the Republican Party and its nominees for President of the United States.

North Florida is a vernacular region of Florida identified by Lamme and Oldakowski (2007) as being somewhat homogenous with the Bible Belt both in geographic extent and in political and cultural attitudes. It is the southernmost area of the South before one reaches areas of Florida which are culturally much more similar to the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States (Zelinsky 1992). North Florida stretches from the First Coast of Florida near Jacksonville and encompasses the entire Florida panhandle to Pensacola. It is a Republican

voting region in which twenty-four of its twenty-seven counties gave at least 50% of the vote share to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election.

In the middle of North Florida is the Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area which is made up of four counties, including the three that did not vote for Bush. Over the following three chapters, this thesis will seek to understand why this occurred. The process will begin by examining predictors of presidential voting in order to understand how they are related to Democratic or Republican voting at both the national level and in the South. Knowing that the South and North Florida are Republican voting regions, this research will then look at the demographic and socio-economic makeup of the region. By first demonstrating how North Florida is a Southern region and knowing which characteristics of the population are the strong predictors of Republican voting in North Florida, a benchmark can be established. By examining and analyzing the same demographic and socio-economic characteristics of Tallahassee, this Democratic region of North Florida can be compared against that benchmark to determine how Tallahassee is different and why it did not demonstrate a similar level of support for Bush. Specifically, I seek to determine whether the anomalous voting patterns of the Tallahassee MSA can be explained by Tallahassee having different “non-Southern” values on the same variables that can be used to explain opposite voting patterns in North Florida and the rest of the South, or whether an alternate explanation is required.

To carry out the above mentioned analyses this paper will examine election results, over time for the regions, side-by-side comparisons of statistics of the regions’ populations and a model of how the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of North Florida and Tallahassee predict voting at the precinct-level. To the advantage of this study, the data are all from the same time period, the year 2000. All census data that will be used are from the 2000 census cycle, additional socio-economic data is also from the year 2000, and the precinct-level election results data is from the 2000 presidential election which replicates the election cycle trend of the study area for the past four decades.

Over the next three chapters, this thesis will seek to unravel a Democratic incongruity on an otherwise homogenous, Republican region. While the goal is to establish what makes

Tallahassee different from North Florida, the results can be expected only to be a beginning to the examination of small regions which are passed over using broad generalizations for large regions such as the South.

An added benefit to using a combination of county and precinct-level data will be the opportunity to critique the analyzing of data (in this case individual voters) that are aggregated to the county and precinct levels. This is an issue of scale which prevents the researcher from truly understanding why individual voters vote the way they do, leaving him only the option of inferring data instead of conducting an analysis that is based on observation of actual results. To compensate for the lack of data on individual votes, this particular study will use precinct level election results merged with census tract level population data, to create a statistical model to understand voting behavior at the lowest possible scale and the highest resolution available in North Florida and the Tallahassee MSA.

LITERATURE REVIEW: VOTING BEHAVIOR in the UNITED STATES

Voting is quite possibly the most honest thing that an individual can do. Although it is not possible to know beyond a doubt that a voter actually voted for the person for whom he or she said they voted, pollsters and political geographers are generally not interested in an individual’s vote. To identify how individuals vote, researchers must understand how a general group of voters tend to vote. These broad generalizations are akin to stereotyping; African Americans vote Democratic or white male Southerners vote Republican. These are not necessarily inaccurate statements, but they hide the complexity behind how an individual decides to cast his or her vote. Around presidential election cycles, there are many studies and analyses that are published which show how the nation votes. These include longitudinal studies focusing on voting in metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas (Morrill et al. 2007) to unraveling political ideology and party identification using election night surveys (Smith 1999).

The body of literature which focuses on what makes people and places either Republican (red) or Democratic (blue) reveals that there is no blanket statement which can apply to the voting habits of any one group of people. Instead, a characteristic that correlates with a group of voters leaning Democratic in one area of the United States may be the same characteristic that correlates to a similar group of voters leaning Republican in a different place. Some demographic or socio-economic variables do not have a linear relationship to voting in a region, but when a part of that variable is isolated, it turns out that there is indeed a strong relationship between one part of that variable and voting. The remainder of this chapter will look at research over the past two decades to learn what can best be applied to understanding why Tallahassee differed from North Florida in the 2000 presidential election.

DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS and VOTING

Race

Of the indicators of an individual’s voting tendencies, race is the strongest. Despite a weak liberal political ideology (Smith 1999), African Americans tend to vote Democratic (Morrill et al. 2007; Williamson 2008), as was the case in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections (Morrill et al. 2007). Whites on the other hand do not as overwhelmingly vote Republican and are closer to being evenly split, though not much closer (Morrill et al. 2007; Williamson 2008).

In the South, where poorer voters are mostly black and rich voters are mostly white, V.O. Key said in 1949 that, “In its grand outlines, the politics of the South revolves around the position of [African Americans]” (1949, 5). Though race is not the defining characteristic of Southern politics or its electoral geography that it once was, it is still important, and any study which failed to include race in an analysis would be lacking (Barth 2004). In fact, the Democratic Party in the South is more bi-racial and continues to become more racially integrated despite large numbers of white Southerners who now register as Republicans (Wattenberg 1991; Barth 2004). The late 20th and early 21st Centuries now bear witness to three distinct blocks of base voters: white Republicans, white Democrats and African American Democrats, especially in the South (Barth 2000) where some of the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate’s victories were only in counties with a sizeable racial or ethnic minority population (Morrill et al. 2007).

Age

One might expect age to have a linear relationship with voting. However, although age is an important factor in party identification, the relationship is not strictly linear. From the middle of the 20th Century to the 1980’s increasing age correlated to decreasing support for the Republican Party in the South where younger voters registered as Republicans (Wattenberg 1991). But at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st Centuries, younger voters nationwide had more liberal ideologies (Williamson 2008) and voters age 18-44 correlated to support for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 (Morrill et al. 2007).

Republican presidential candidates found more support among older voters over the age of 65 and sometimes as young as in the mid-fifties. This may be due, in part, to the fact that while older voters sometimes identify with the Democratic Party, they are less likely to have a liberal political ideology (Smith 1999). For the age cohorts between their late twenties and early thirties to early fifties, there is no clear partisan tendency, at the national level, to support one candidate over the other (Morrill et al. 2007; Williamson 2008).

Gender

Although there is a correlation between gender and voting, the effect of gender on voting is slight (Smith 1993), but it should not be left out of a statistical analysis. At the national level, women leaned Democratic when they cast their vote in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 (Morrill et al. 2007). Conversely, men have a history of voting for conservative Republicans (Smith 1993). This is likely due to women having more liberal political ideologies than men (Wattenberg 1991; Smith 1999; Williamson 2008). This gender-gap becomes more evident when one looks at the voting habits of white male and female Protestants in the South. In this generally conservative region, Protestant women are more likely to have less conservative views than men (Wattenberg 1991) and have been more likely to vote Democratic on a regular basis over the past several decades. While gender does play a role in voting at the national level, there is little variation in gender ratio across regions (USCB 2000). Only the instance of a noticeable variation in ratio might affect differences in voting from one region to another.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS and VOTING

The socio-economic characteristics of voters, level of education, income and religious affiliation/church attendance/membership are some of the strongest indicators of voting preference or party affiliation. Nationally, religion does not play as strong a role in electoral geography as it does in the poorer and more religious states of the South (Gallup 2008), education has a fairly linear relationship with political ideology (Williamson 2008) and income has a complex correlation to voting as it is statistically related to other factors such as race, and education, and the nature of its relationship with voting preference varies by place and scale

(Gelman 2008). The relationship between each of these variables and voter preference is detailed below.

Religion

One of the most powerful among the powers of place is religion (de Blij 2009); and there is a strong relationship between religion and voting (Gelman 2008; Gallup 2008). Among Republican voters in the 2000 Bush-Gore and 2004 Bush-Kerry elections, many attended church frequently (Morrill et al. 2007) and were predominantly Protestant or of some other Christian denomination other than Catholic (Williamson 2008). Protestants are less supportive of Democrats and the denomination correlates to Republican voting while Catholics and Jewish people lean more Democratic (Wattenberg 1991), despite the less liberal political views of Catholics (Williamson 2008).

Despite the different political leanings of various faiths, a recent Gallup poll (2008) sums up the overall relationship between religiosity and voting as it stood during the 2008 presidential election season. In the 2008 presidential election between Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican nominee John McCain, religiosity of individual states had a clear linear relationship to voting. Of the ten most religious states (with religiosity indicated by the importance of religion in the respondents’ daily lives), nine voted for the Republican candidate (all were Southern states). Conversely, of the ten least religious states, nine gave their electoral votes to the Democratic candidate (all were New England or West Coast states). Simply put, at the national level, in the present decade, in the United States, the more religious a state’s population is, the more likely it is to vote Republican, a trend which is clearly visible in the South.

A recent Pew survey of the religious landscape of the US outlines the party affiliation and political ideologies of various faiths. Of the religious traditions common to the South (evangelical, mainline and historically black churches), members of African American Protestant denominations lean overwhelmingly Democratic, while those of the primarily white Christian faiths identify Republican, but to a lesser degree. Otherwise, members of African American

denominations are equally as conservative, ideologically, as those who belong to mainline churches. Standing out from all faiths, however, are those who belong to (predominantly white) evangelical churches, a majority of which are ideologically conservative (Pew 2009).

In the South, where Christians frequently dominate political parties, the Republican Party has a higher percentage of weekly church attendees who are members of some Protestant denomination (Clark 2004). What the Democratic Party has that the Republican Party does not is a strong African American base (recall the importance of race in voting). With this being the case, and in a region where religion is sometimes a divider within the Democratic Party, race has a propensity to override religious (Clark 2004) and ideological differences (Pew 2009). Gender also tends to override religious affiliation. This is somewhat more apparent in the South where Protestant males are likely to vote Republican while women of the same religious affiliation will be less likely to do so (Wattenberg 1991). Again, despite the intricate relationships between religion, race and gender in voting, the South is still a very religious region that has supported the Republican Party in every presidential election since 1980.

Education

Education has a more linear relationship to partisan voting. Typically, the more educated a voter is, the more likely the voter is to support the Democratic candidate for president (Morrill et al. 2007) and to have a more liberal political ideology (Williamson 2008).

In the 2000 and 2004 elections, voters with only a high school degree leaned Republican over Democrat in contrast to voters with higher educational attainment who leaned Democratic over Republican (Morrill et al. 2007). The relationship between education and voting preference was confirmed by Shelley (2008) who found that, in the presidential primaries of 2008, Barrack Obama, a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination, won more counties containing colleges and universities than his main opponent, Hillary Clinton. This lends some credibility to the possibility that college educated voters may have perceived him to be more Democratic, or liberal than Clinton who lost the Democratic nomination for president to Obama. Similarly,

some of the few victories that Democratic candidate John Kerry had in the South in 2004 were in counties that were home to major universities (Morrill et al. 2007).

This linear relationship between where increased education is correlated with Democratic voting appears to be relatively new in American politics. In his analysis of 1988 voting results, Wattenberg (1991) found a three-way positive correlation between income, education, and vote: the lowest income voters voted Democratic as well as those with at most a high school education, while middle income voters with at least a bachelor’s degree voted Republican. More recent data, however, reveal that while the positive correlation between income and Republican remains, the correlation between education and Republican voting has reversed, with higher education being correlated significantly with Democratic voting (Morrill et al. 2007; Williamson 2008).

Income

Income, which tends to increase with educational attainment (USCB 2002), is a complex variable as a predictor of voting behavior in presidential elections. The variation in the relationship between income and voting is related to other variables such as education (USCB 2002), race or religion as well as geographic variables such as region and scale (Gelman 2008).

Nationally, the percentage of people who are born-again Christians is higher among the poor than the rich. The typical conservative voter makes less than $20,000 per year (which corresponds to having a high school degree or less (USCB 2002)) or over $100,000 per year (which corresponds to having a professional degree (USCB 2002)). Those with a more mid- level income $50,000-$75,000 per year (which corresponds to having a bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degree (USCB 2002)) tend to vote Democratic (Williamson 2008). But the trend varies as people in wealthier parts of the country are usually less religious and more socially liberal and vote Democratic regardless of their individual (or household) wealth. There are intricate variations at the state and county level as well (Gelman 2008).

Republicans do best in the South among high income voters where, historically, richer counties have had a majority Republican vote share. Although this trend declined in the 2000

and 2004 presidential elections (when there was less difference between rich and poor counties nationally) the variance between rich and poor counties – with wealthier counties voting Republican and poorer counties in the South voting Democratic – remained so in the South. It seems likely that the persistence of this variance in the South is due to the correlation between income and race: wealthier counties are less likely to have a significant black population than are poorer counties (Gelman 2008).

Population Density (Urban vs. Rural)

Residence in an urbanized versus rural area is a variable that is also closely correlated to voting behavior (Morrill et al. 2007). This distinction is not visible at the macrogeographic scale (Archer 1988); such as differences in voting tendencies between the Republican South and the more liberal Northwest United States. Instead, this distinction is easier to see at the county level or lower. For instance, in the South, an urbanized county is more likely to vote Democratic than a more rural one, a difference that is not visible when generalizing a cultural region such as the South.

However, the tendency for more urban areas to vote Democratic and for rural areas to vote Republican does not always hold true. An example of this exception would be Democratic voting rural areas within an otherwise heavily Republican South such as “Black Belt” counties in Alabama and Georgia or extreme northern rural counties in Minnesota, Wisconsin or Maine. The opposite would be Republican voting, urban metropolitan areas such as Salt Lake City or Houston (Morrill et al. 2007).

Voter Turnout

On Election Day, however, it doesn’t matter if a voter is well educated, lives on a farm or goes to church on Sunday. All of those factors are for naught if the voter doesn’t vote. Leighley and Nagler (1992) compared voter turnout by demographic characteristic in the United States between the South and the Non-South. Their study examined variation in voter turnout both temporally and spatially between the years 1972 and 1984, resulting in the conclusion that all correlations between demographics and voter turnout displayed little variation over a 12 year

period (with the exception that blacks and women were more likely to vote in 1984 compared to 1972). Likewise, there was little spatial variation across regions, which suggests that aggregating data across a region such as the South would not misrepresent smaller pockets of voters at a larger scale. Additionally, Leighley and Nagler (1992) pointed out that while there may be little variation in voter turnout among the various demographics, it doesn’t mean that individual voter preference will be stable over time.

Conclusion

Of myriad factors that can have even a slight effect on voter behavior, there is a core which is useful as strong predictors of how groups of voters will behave. They are race, gender, age, religion, education, income and population density. Some of these variables have different effects on voting behavior according to geographic region or scale. For instance, income is not purely linear as it predicts voting behavior differently in different regions or at different scales. Age is also not a linear predictor of voting behavior as younger and older voters share similar behavior but more middle-age voters lean a different way politically. Gender presents a different problem: While it is of some use in predicting individual voting behavior, it is of little use in explaining regional trends, due to insignificant interregional variance (Wattenberg 1991; Smith 1999; Morrill et al. 2007). Finally, religion is also a complex issue as it is sometimes difficult to pin social and political attitudes to specific denominations (Heatwole 1978; Pew 2009) although broader religious groups hold similar beliefs. Race, education, and population density are more reliable predictors of how groups of people vote as their relationship to voting behavior is more linear and varies little across space and at different scales, but even here one can overgeneralize by looking at too broad a scale.

Over the course of this project, the more linear indicators of race, education, and population density will be the primary factors in explaining variation in voting behavior across a region. Where variation does not exist, the secondary indicators of age, income and religion may pick up the slack in explaining what may be the more intricate relationship between the variables discussed as they relate to actual voting behavior, in this case the 2000 U.S. presidential election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

Sometimes, a combination of indicators of voting tendencies is attributed to a large region usually based on what is considered to be a homogeneous culture, and to the people of that cultural region. For instance most people in the United States, from California to Maine to Alabama, consider the South to be a culturally and politically conservative region which has supported every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. So all parts and people of the South may be associated with this one voting tendency which is usually attributed to white, male voters who usually have low income and lower educational attainment and who attend Protestant church.

The literature has shown that there are two generalizations that can be made about the voting population at the national level. Simply put, supporters of the Democratic candidate for president can be expected to have a significant share of the African American population, be less religious, female, younger, better educated and wealthier and live in urban areas outside the South. Republicans, by-and-large are white Southern males, older, less educated with lower income and live in rural areas. As a region, the South would appear to exemplify the base of the Republican Party especially in that it is viewed as a highly religious region of the country that is poor and rural and populated by poorly educated white males who occupy the 11 states of the former Confederacy.

Although it is clear that the factors discussed are among the most important in understanding how the electoral landscape of the United States and its regions are created through voting, there are certainly other variables which are too numerous to be included in any one study. Utilizing the conclusions of these previous studies, this paper will employ the factors of race, gender, and age as well as religion, income and education, and population density to delve into why part of Florida’s panhandle (a Southern region) (Key 1949; Lamme and Oldakowski 2007) was an anomaly in the region of North Florida in the 2000 presidential election. The reasonable expectation is that the variables discussed will present themselves as the answer to that anomaly in a socially conservative region (Morrill et al. 2007) where the Republican Party enjoys the strategic benefits of a strong regional base (Wattenberg 1991).

ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY of NORTH FLORIDA

North Florida, as a vernacular region, is Southern. That is, it shares many cultural, socio- political (Lamme and Oldakowski 2007) and demographic (USCB 2000) characteristics with the larger, primary region of the South (Zelinsky 1992). It is the southeastern corner of the South and is as distinct from the rest of Florida as the South is from the rest of the United States. Like the southern United States, North Florida is more religious, less urban and less wealthy than the rest of the nation. Additionally, the region has supported the Republican or conservative candidate for president in nearly every election since 1968.

V.O. Key (1949, 83) described Florida as a state unlike any other in the South, and that the state’s only real connections to the South were that it was physically attached to Alabama and Georgia, and that it voted with the South. Compared with other Southern states, Florida is much more urbanized and has a higher average per capita income. As Zelinsky (1992) notes, in some cases, Florida is more like a North Eastern state than a Southern state. These analyses, however, fail to account for vast geographic differentiation within Florida. Key (1949) notes the vast distances between, for instance, Tallahassee and the Florida Keys (620 mi), or between Miami and Jacksonville (350 mi). Thus, while Florida as a whole may lack Southern regional characteristics, the northern part of the state is culturally and politically Southern. Similar to the North-South divide of the United States, Florida has its own North-South division with the “Northern” population living at the tip of the peninsula of the state and the “Southern” population in North Florida and the state’s interior (Zelinsky 1992).

In studies over the past several decades, the southern boundary of the South has been drawn in Florida as a line from approximately the inside corner of the state’s Gulf Coast to the North East corner of the state, south of the city of Jacksonville (Reed 1976, 1990; Lamme and Oldakowski 1982, 2007). Before 2007, each of the studies which delineated the region used business listings in a telephone directory as their data sources. These studies selected businesses that incorporated words such as “South” or “Southern” and “Dixie” (another word with Southern

connotations) and analyzed the spatial distribution of the ratios of those businesses to businesses using terms such as “American”. The various results are shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1: Cultural Landscape of North Florida

Clearly results have differed over the years but it is not unreasonable to consider each variation, “correct”. Compared to Reed’s (1976) first look at the South, following works (Reed 1990; Alderman and Beavers 1999) found that the region was becoming slightly less prominent on the cultural landscape but was certainly not in danger of disappearing. The region of North Florida, depicted as part of the Bible Belt (Lamme and Oldakowski 2007) as well as part of the South (Reed 1976; Garreau 1981; Zelinsky 1992; Alderman 1999), has been identified as a distinct cultural and political region within the state (Lamme and Oldakowski 2007).

For this particular study, the latest definition of North Florida, according to Lamme and Oldakowski (2007), will be used. The method of selecting a North Florida that shared county

boundaries was to select counties that have a geographic center that is north of the line representing the southern-most boundary of the Bible Belt in Figure 3.2. The Bible Belt was used instead of the shaded region representing North Florida because, in their study, Lamme and Oldakowski (2007) determined that “Bible Belt” described a region with specific cultural and social values whereas “North Florida” represents the area only as a directional region. Because the two regions roughly coincide, for the purposes of this study, the region is referred to strictly as North Florida to remove any cultural or religious connotations that the use of “Bible Belt” may imply.

Figure 3.2: Twenty-Seven County Study Area

In a survey-based study of Florida culture regions, 76% of respondents in North Florida identified it as a politically conservative region with fewer than 10% considering it to be liberal. Compared to other regions of the state, it was the least liberal by a margin of over 35%. In a similar fashion, the Bible Belt region of the state, which is nearly synonymous with the region of North Florida, was identified by half of its residents as “very religious”, more than any other cultural region in the state by about 15%. Additionally, only 2% of those surveyed in the Bible

Belt region of Florida considered the region to be “not very religious” (Lamme and Oldakowski 2007).

This highly religious region of North Florida is dominated by two Christian denominations. Looking at religious adherence across the state, more than 50% of the population of most North Florida counties belongs to some Christian denomination, compared to the remainder of the state where less than a fourth of the counties report the same level of religious adherence (Warf 2007). Breaking down the spatial distribution of religious adherence by county finds that the Baptist denomination dominates most of North Florida with levels of Methodist membership coming in at a close second while adherents to the Jewish and Catholic faiths are all but non-existent (Warf 2007). This dominant presence of Protestant Christian faiths over Catholic and Jewish is one leg of the Republican Party’s base in the region. In addition to the predominantly white denominations, membership in historically African American Protestant denominations is very strong in a handful of counties in North Florida (Glenmary 2002) which is a large part of the Democratic Party’s base in the region.

The aforementioned studies by Lamme and Oldakowski (2007) and Warf (2007) each in very different ways provide empirical evidence that North Florida is a Southern region. The former demonstrated this with a survey of residents of the region and the results are confirmed by the latter which demonstrated the dominance of conservative religious denominations in the region. Besides the presence of white, Protestant denominations, including Baptist and Methodist, of note is the relatively high rate of membership among historically African American denominations (Glenmary 2002). This parallels the relatively larger African American population in the region (USCB 2000). But religion is not the only characteristic that North Florida shares with the South.

NORTH FLORIDA DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

Statistically (descriptive) speaking, the population of North Florida shares many characteristics with the population of the South as it is defined by the US Census Bureau. Over the last few decades, the South has been defined as the eleven former states of the Confederate

States of America (Key 1949; Clark and Prysby 2004) and, in some cases, has included parts of Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia (Garreau 1981; Zelinsky 1992). The Census Bureau, however, has a broader definition, which includes Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia (the eleven states of the former CSA) as well as Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma and West Virginia. For the remainder of this paper, any descriptive statistics of the South will be based on the more inclusive, 16-state, US Census Bureau’s definition of the South.

The first set of demographic characteristics that are key to understanding voting in the United States are race, gender and age, as discussed in Chapter Two. Table 3.1 compares the demographic makeup of North Florida with the South and the United States using these variables. In this table and the tables that follow, the Census Bureau’s 16-state definition of the South is used.

Table 3.1: Demographic Makeup of the United States, the South & North Florida

Race, Gender & Age 18 & Up United States South North Florida White 77.4% 75.0% 75.2% African American 11.4% 17.4% 19.9% Male 48.3% 48.2% 49.2% Female 51.7% 51.8% 50.8% >65yo 9.1% 9.1% 8.4% 55-64 6.3% 6.5% 6.4% 45-54 9.8% 9.7% 9.7% 35-44 11.8% 11.6% 11.7% 25-34 10.4% 10.5% 10.3% 18-24 7.1% 7.2% 7.7% Source: 2000 US Census

A quick look at the age cohorts shows that there is little variation from the national scale to North Florida. There are only minor variations from the age 25-34 cohort to the age 55-64 cohort. North Florida, however, has more people in the age 18-24 cohort than the rest of the

United States (possibly reflecting the significant military presence in the region) and fewer people in the over 65 cohort (partly as a function of more people who are younger and because North Florida does not serve as a destination for retirees compared to South Florida). Thus, the voting age population of North Florida is considerably younger than that of the United States and somewhat younger than that of the South.

An additional difference, although not necessarily an indicator of Southern-ness, is gender. North Florida’s ratio of men to women is higher than that of the South or the United States. This difference likely is due to the same factors that make North Florida somewhat younger than the rest of the country: military presence combined with reduced life expectancy. North Florida contains two major Navy training facilities in Pensacola, two large Navy stations in Jacksonville and two Air Force bases in Florida’s panhandle which could account for the larger male population. Again, although a preponderance of males is not typical of the South, it does mark a significant difference between North Florida and the rest of the United States (and it should be recalled that men are slightly more prone to Republican voting than women (Smith 1993; Morrill et al. 2007)).

The other difference between the South and the United States which is shared by North Florida which has been significantly linked to voting behavior nationwide is race. Compared to the United States, the South has a much higher African American population. Despite the even higher proportion of blacks in North Florida, it has fewer other minorities than the South.

NORTH FLORIDA SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS

The second set of factors that are significantly related to voting is the socio-economic characteristics. They are level of education attained, religion, income and whether one resides in an urban or rural area. Tables 3.2a, b, c and d provide comparisons of each for the US, the South and North Florida.

Higher educational attainment has been correlated to Democratic voting. Therefore, as a region that consistently votes Republican, one would expect that residents of North Florida would be relatively uneducated compared to the rest of the United States.

Table 3.2a: Educational Attainment for Population Age 25 and Older

Educational Attainment United States South North Florida Less than High School 20% 22% 19% High School Degree 29% 29% 30% Some College or Associate's 27% 27% 30% Bachelor's Degree or Higher 24% 23% 21% Source: 2000 US Census

Table 3.2a, however, reveals no clear difference in education level between the regions (except for the fact that North Floridians who attend college are less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree than are people in the South or the US). In general, this data is relatively inconclusive as there is no great variance from region to region and through the educational attainment continuum. However, if the line between whether or not a person is educated is drawn based on the attainment of a bachelor’s degree, then North Florida is less educated than the nation or the South, and therefore would be more likely to vote Republican, in accordance with the discussion in Chapter Two.

Closely linked to educational attainment is income. Having a non-linear relationship to partisan voting, those with incomes below $20,000 per year and above $100,000 per year are more likely to vote for the Republican candidate in presidential elections. Like the South, North Florida has a lower median income than the United States as Table 3.2b shows. All three regional groupings have an equal proportion of middle-income voters, who are most likely Democratic supporters. North Florida and the South have more households with an income of less than $20,000 per year and both regions, especially North Florida, have fewer people living on more than $100,000 per year. In short, all three regions have similar percentages of people in Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning income cohorts, so income itself may not be a valid predictor of the region’s voting behavior though differences across the regions should still be noted.

Table 3.2b: Median Household Income and Income Levels

Income United States South North Florida Median HH Income $41,994 $38,790 $33,044 <$20,000/yr 22% 25% 25% $50,000-$75,000/yr 19% 19% 19% >$100,000/yr 12% 10% 8% Source: 2000 US Census

The third variable, religion, is often discussed in the media as it relates to politics and how people of various faiths (usually Christian) cast their votes. In the South, religion is one of the major players in politics (Clark 2004) and, as such, can be expected to present itself as a key point of difference when comparing how different regions vote. North Florida actually demonstrates a lower level of religiosity as compared to the less Republican South and the United States. With this being the case, overall religiosity may not be what explains Republican vote share in North Florida. Rather, it likely is the distribution of denominational membership among the population which influences Republican vote share. Of the percentage of the population that belongs to a church congregation, North Florida has a much higher percentage of Protestants. Especially notable is the high percentage of Baptists (20%) compared to the approximately 8.5% in the South and the United States. Recalling the role that religion plays in politics in the South, it is not unreasonable to assume the increased membership in more conservative Protestant denominations such as Baptist is a cause for increased Republican vote share in North Florida

There is also an increased percent share of membership in the Historically African American denominations. This corresponds to the increased percentage of African Americans who live in North Florida compared to the South and the US. In the United States and the South, the denominations with members who are more prone to voting Democratic (Catholics, Jews and African Americans) make up 31.4% and 25.3% of religious membership, respectively, compared

to North Florida where these groups make up only 19.4% of the churchgoing population. In short, the decrease in overall religiosity among the population in North Florida is made up for by the higher percentage of membership among the denominations whose members are prone to vote Republican (Methodists and Baptists) than those who are prone to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate.

Table 3.2c: Church Membership by Denomination

Denomination United States South North Florida Percent of Total Population 59.5% 62.3% 57.0% Catholic 22.0% 12.2% 6.0% Methodist 3.7% 5.8% 5.0% Baptist 8.5% 8.6% 20.0% Jewish 2.2% 1.3% 0.4% Historically African American 7.2% 11.8% 13.0% Source: Glenmary Research Center, 2002

Turning to the urban vs. rural (or population density) variable in Table 3.2d, the United States Census Bureau designates a place as urban if it is “urbanized” or is a designated place of at least 2,500 persons. Otherwise it is considered rural. As was discussed in Chapter Two, rural areas are more likely to vote Republican than urban areas. This is the case in the South and in North Florida. Here, the region falls in between the South and the US. Some reasons for this may include the presence of three “major” urban centers: Jacksonville on the east coast, Pensacola at the western tip of the state’s panhandle, and the Tallahassee area in the middle of North Florida as well as the region’s nearly 300 miles of coast line.

Table 3.2d: Population Density (Urban vs. Rural)

Location United States South North Florida Urban 79% 73% 76% Rural 21% 27% 24% Source: 2000 US Census

ELECTION RESULTS OVER TIME

North Florida does not only exhibit its “Southern-ness” through its demographic makeup and socio-economic characteristics. Since the passing of the Civil Rights Era Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, and the political realignment of the United States in the 1968 Nixon-Humphrey presidential election, North Florida has demonstrated consistent (although not unswerving) support for Republican candidates for president. These trends are shown in Table 3.3.

Table 3.3: Presidential Support: 1968-2008 Election Year United States* South* North Florida** 1968 Republican (43%) Rep-37% Dem-33% George Wallace (≈50%) Wallace-30% 1972 Republican (61%) Republican (69%) Republican (≈70%) 1976 Democrat (50%) Democrat (54%) Democrat (≈60%) 1980 Republican (51%) Republican (51%) Republican (54%) 1984 Republican (59%) Republican (62%) Republican (67%) 1988 Republican (53%) Republican (58%) Republican (65%) 1992 Democrat (43%) Rep-42% Dem-42% Republican (61%) 1996 Democrat (49%) Democrat (47%) Republican (48%) 2000 Republican (48%) Republican (48%) Republican (60%) 2004 Republican (51%) Republican (54%) Republican (61%) 2008 Democrat (53%) Republican (53%) Republican (58%) Note: Precise data unavailable for North Florida for 1968, 1972 & 1976. *Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections **Florida Division of Elections

With the exception of the 1976 election and the special case of the 1968 election, the South has voted more Republican than the nation as a whole and North Florida has voted more Republican than the South. Beginning with the 1968 contest between the Republican Richard Nixon, Democrat Herbert Humphrey and the segregationist George Wallace, Southern states gave a plurality of their votes to Richard Nixon. Wallace was a Southerner, pro-segregationist, and the governor of Alabama (a quintessential Southern candidate), while Nixon was from California. Between the two candidates though, they collectively garnered a majority of Southern votes while in the rest of the United States, the election was more of a contest between Humphrey and Nixon alone. George Wallace, on the other hand, won every county in North Florida. When Nixon was up for reelection in 1972, 69% of all Southern votes went to Nixon with North Florida showing similar support.

The 1976 election saw the candidacy of the Southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter from Georgia, whose campaign was aided by virtue of Carter hailing from the South. Following Carter in 1980 was Ronald Reagan, favored not only by Southerners but by the United States as a whole, an affair which the electorate demonstrated in his re-election in 1984 and followed up with the election of his Vice-President, George H.W. Bush in 1988. Thus, in every election from 1968 to 2008, North Florida showed that it was more Southern than the South in terms of candidates who most closely represented Southern ideals.

This was particularly evident in 1992 when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton split the Southern popular vote evenly. Once again, North Florida demonstrated considerably more support for the conservative candidate than the rest of the South, disregarding the fact that Bill Clinton and his vice-presidential candidate, Al Gore, were from Southern states. In 1996, the South aligned itself with the rest of the nation in popular votes, casting 47% of its votes for Clinton. However, Bob Dole, the Republican candidate retained 48% of the popular vote of North Florida. And despite the divisiveness of the 2000 presidential election results in South Florida, George W. Bush garnered nearly two-thirds of the popular vote in North Florida, which may be partly responsible for his winning the electoral votes of the entire state. The support that

North Florida showed Bush increased in the 2004 election and that was paralleled throughout the South.

Of course, the 2008 presidential election was new territory for politics in the United States and the nation’s electorate. While the media was comparing a coming recession to the Great Depression that ushered Democrat Franklin Roosevelt into the presidency in 1932, 2008 was the first time that an African American was on the ticket of a major political party as the nominee for president. Despite the poor economy however, the drop in Republican vote share in the South and North Florida from 2004 to 2008 was small (see Table 3.3). This is possibly related to the fact that for white Republican voters, the alternative to a bad economy (an African American president) was not appealing. Despite Southern voters, the United States voted Barack Obama into the presidency while the South and especially North Florida remained nearly as Republican as they were in the 2000 and 2004 elections.

North Florida was not only Southern in its support of the Republican candidates for president in every single election (except 1976) since 1968, but it regularly demonstrated more support for Republican presidential candidates (except 1976) than the South as a whole. Thus, one would expect that the same variables that have been used by others to explain why the South as a whole trends Republican would also explain regional differences in voting behavior within one sub-region of the South: North Florida.

NORTH FLORIDA PRECINCT ANALYSIS

To determine if North Florida’s voting behavior followed this Republican voting trend for the same reasons as the South, two separate analyses were conducted. The first analysis looked at demographic (race, gender and age) and socio-economic (education, income and religion) characteristics along with geography (urban vs. rural), by county, in conjunction with the results of the 2000 election. The second analysis is a multivariate linear regression of the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the population of North Florida on Republican vote share of the 2000 presidential election by voting precinct.

In the comparative analysis using Tables 3.1 and 3.2(a-d) both socio-economic and demographic characteristics were examined side-by-side in order to establish that North Florida is Southern as far as the makeup of the population is concerned. Because population data and voting data are not available in the same geography (voting precincts versus census block groups), it was necessary to merge the population data into the voting precincts in order to conduct the analysis.

Using TransCAD GIS, a technique called areal interpolation was used to merge the block-level census data into the precinct-level voting data. In this method, the proportion of the areal unit that lies within a given precinct is the basis for population estimation. If, for example, half of a census block falls within a voting precinct, then half of that census block’s population is considered to belong in that precinct. The remaining population of that census block would also be proportionally distributed among any other precinct in which some part of it lies. This method, of course, assumes an even population distribution within a given census block (Horner and Murray 2004).

Although this technique may be somewhat questionable because of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), the issue is potentially reduced for the two commonalities shared by the 1377 census block groups and 969 voting precincts in North Florida. First, the boundaries of both the census block groups and precincts do not cross the boundaries of the counties and this prevents data from a census block group in one county from being distributed to a precinct in a neighboring county. Second, some of the boundaries of block groups and precincts are contiguous and the amount of overlay of a block group on several precincts is somewhat minimal as the block groups and precincts tend to be similar in geographic size.

Of additional note is the fact that the data from the census block groups is for every individual counted in the 2000 Census. The data in the voting precincts is generated by a different population, specifically, those who actually voted in the 2000 election. At first glance, this may seem like a problem that would cause regression results that would not accurately reflect the relationship between characteristics of the general population and Republican vote share in each precinct. In reality, this is the best way to understand the Republican vote share in

the context of North Florida. It is the entire population of North Florida (and the Tallahassee MSA in the next chapter) which is the environment or cultural milieu in which votes are cast by registered voters. This is the best way to understand and the Republican vote share in North Florida and the Tallahassee MSA.

Using SPSS, percent African American, average median age, percent female, average median family income and population density from the census block groups were selected as the independent variables along with percent share of votes for the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush as the dependent variable. Because of the direct relationship between income and educational attainment, income is used as a surrogate for educational attainment which was not available at the census block group level for this regression.

Table 3.4a: Multivariate Regression of Predictive Variables on Republican Vote Share (North Florida) Independent Variable Republican Vote Share

% African American -.81 (.001)***

% Female -.102 (.001)***

Average Median Age .005 (.789)

Average Median Family Income .02 (.323)

Population Density -.025 (.218) ______Note: Adjusted R-squared .718 n=969 *p<.05. **p<.01. ***p<.001.

Of the demographic variables, race (percent African American) has a strong negative relationship to Republican vote share. In the South, there are three legs to this variable: white Republicans, white Democrats and African American Democrats. Thus, race is the most important and predictive variable of voting in North Florida. Gender has a weaker inverse relationship to Republican voting in North Florida and although percent female is not a strong predictor of how a region will vote, it is still significant at the .001 level. There is no clear linear relationship between average median age and Republican voting in North Florida.

The remaining variables did not demonstrate any significant ability to predict Republican vote share one way or the other. This was somewhat unexpected for population density as Morrill et al. (2007) showed that rural populations tend to vote Republican more than Democratic in presidential elections. The weak relationship between average median family income is not surprising due to the non-linear relationship between the general tendencies of voters in the United States and income (Gelman 2008; Williamson 2008). Another possibility for this could be that place matters more than an individual’s educational attainment (which was substituted by income) and the high level of “Southernness” of the region subverts any ability of income to predict voting in North Florida.

Although the assumed explanations for the relationships between the independent variables and Republican vote share in North Florida may be true, the correlation matrix in Table 3.4b demonstrates a high level of intercorrelation of the independent variables. Focusing on the independent variable with the highest beta coefficient (percent African American), it is clear that there are weak to moderate relationships between it and the other independent variables which did not have strong relationships with Republican vote share. Of note is the moderately strong indirect relationship between race and population density, income and age. This intercorrelation, may explain why the latter independent variables did not have a stronger relationship with Republican vote share in the model.

Table 3.4b: Intercorrelation of Independent Variables (North Florida) Average %African Population Median % Female Average Median American Density Family Age Income

% African 1 .409** -.452** .097** -.331** American

Population 1 -.114** .282** -.356** Density

Average Median 1 .046 .363** Family Income

% Female 1 .017

Average Median 1 Age ______**p<.01.

Another way to understand the model is to map the predicted Republican vote share for each precinct, compare it to the observed Republican vote share, and map the residuals for each precinct. This has been done in Figure 3.3 using ArcGIS. Using the predicted, observed and residual values, three separate choropleth maps were created to visualize by how much and where the model over predicts or under predicts Republican vote share in North Florida.

The dominant theme of Figure 3.3 is that most of the precincts in the map of the residual values are light color. This indicates that the model works well across North Florida. There tends to be a normal distribution of over and underpredicted Republican vote share among the precincts. The greatest residuals tend to be in more densely populated and geographically smaller precincts in the Tallahassee MSA (center of the region), Escambia County (westernmost)

and in Duval County (easternmost) as well as other smaller precincts interspersed in the region. Perhaps further adding to any variation of the predicted vote share from the observed is voter turnout. Although it was not included in this regression, it might have been helpful in explaining any unexpected results of the regression model. Overall though, the model appears to be generally reliable, suggesting that the variables will be suitable for a regression model using the same set of variables on Republican vote share for the Tallahassee MSA in Chapter Four.

Figure 3.3: Predicted, Observed and Residual Values for Republican Vote Share for North Florida

More Southern than the South

The purpose of this chapter was to establish that North Florida is a Southern region and to have a context or background against which to compare Tallahassee. Additionally, the chapter also determined which of the available demographic and socio-economic characteristics would be suitable for predicting Republican vote share in Tallahassee precincts. This was accomplished for most of the important variables that are related to voting discussed in Chapter Two. Compared to the United States, the South is not too different from the rest of the nation; or rather the nation is not too different from the South. Where the South demonstrated its “Southernness” is also where North Florida demonstrated how much more Southern it is than the South. Most prominent is the larger African American population in North Florida.

In addition to a different demographic makeup, North Florida’s population has a lower educational attainment, lower median income and is more rural than the United States. However, as shown by the model, these are weak predictors of Republican vote share in the region. Also, nearly as important and closely linked to race is the denomination makeup of the church-going population of the region. While the level of religiosity in North Florida is similar to that of the United States (it in fact is lower), the makeup of the religious population is quite different. In North Florida, African American Protestant denominations and Baptists account for about a third of the church-going membership compared to the South with smaller Baptist and African American denomination church membership; and the U.S. as a whole where membership in these denominations is even lower.

In the end, though, the only significant predictors of Republican vote share in North Florida were percent African American and percent female. So these are expected to be similarly predictive in the Tallahassee MSA model which will be presented in the following chapter.

By establishing that North Florida is a Southern region with respect to the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the population, this chapter has set benchmarks against which to measure Tallahassee using descriptive statistics. Having this frame of reference in

which to view Tallahassee enables this study to look at individual variables such as religion or race to determine which ones may have the strongest overall effect on the electoral landscape of North Florida, and to understand the anomaly on said landscape that is the Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area.

ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY of the TALLAHASSEE MSA

By its political behavior, demographic makeup and religion, North Florida has been established in the literature as a Southern region with one exception. Across the region, from Jacksonville to Pensacola, with the political traditions of Dixie and the culture of the Bible Belt, North Florida has a history of racism; such as in Lake City, which was one of the first communities to organize a Ku Klux Klan-like group (Fiedler 1993, 259), on-going self segregation of Jacksonville’s neighborhoods (Fiedler 1993, 310), and Escambia, the most conservative county in the nation, according to Reverend Jerry Falwell (Fiedler 1993, 325). The exception in the middle of the region is the Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area (Figures 4.1a and 4.1b) which includes Tallahassee in Leon County and its neighbors of Jefferson, Gadsden and Wakulla Counties.

Figure 4.1a: North Florida and the Tallahassee MSA

Figure 4.1b: Counties of the Tallahassee MSA

Approximately 75% of the MSA’s population is in Leon County, which includes the city of Tallahassee, the seat of government for the state, two universities and a community college. Gadsden County, to the West has a larger percentage of African American voters than any other county in North Florida. Jefferson County could be described as a suburb county of Leon as there are new neighborhood developments on the county borders and many of the residents of those neighborhoods live in Jefferson County but work in Tallahassee. The same is somewhat true for Wakulla County, on the coast, which has lower levels of church membership than any county in North Florida. The least Democratic county of the Tallahassee MSA, Wakulla does not necessarily reflect the general political tendencies of the whole MSA.

Despite the different characteristics of each of the four counties, the populations of these counties interact with each other on a daily basis. As the daily commuting data in Table 4.1 shows, roughly half of the working populations in each of Gadsden, Jefferson and Wakulla Counties work in Leon County. This should come as little surprise as Tallahassee is the largest city in North Florida for a distance of about 100 miles to Valdosta, Georgia, 160 miles to

Jacksonville and 200 miles to Pensacola. With this being the case, at most, only 8% of the workforce in any one of the counties commutes to a location outside of the Tallahassee MSA.

Table 4.1: Commuting Among the Tallahassee MSA Counties

Year 2000 Commuting Data within the Tallahassee MSA To Gadsden Jefferson Leon Wakulla Total Gadsden 49% 0.02% 46% 0.15% 95% Jefferson 0.7% 43% 47% 0.9% 92% From Leon 2% 0.3% 95% 0.7% 98% Wakulla 1% 0.3% 55% 39% 95% Source: 2000 US Census

Chapter Three, The Electoral Geography of North Florida, began by outlining how North Florida is a Southern region. Compared to the South, North Florida is, in some respects, more “Southern” than the South. To show how North Florida is a Southern region, Chapter Three compared demographic characteristics (race, age and gender) along with socio-economic characteristics (religion, income and education) and urban versus rural between the two regions. This was followed by a side-by-side examination of regional and national trends of presidential elections since 1968 paired with a regression of North Florida precinct-level voting in the 2000 presidential election. The results showed that the larger the percentage of African Americans in a precinct, the more likely that precinct was to have a lower Republican vote share in the 2000 election.

This chapter will mirror the previous one and begin with an analysis of the precinct data for the Tallahassee MSA. From there, a comparison of the voting trends since 1968 will be made between Tallahassee, North Florida and the South. Based on the results of the precinct- level regression and voting trends over time, this chapter will seek out differences in

demographic and socio-economic variables, for the time of the election, between Tallahassee and North Florida to determine if the variables which make North Florida a Southern region also distinguish Tallahassee from North Florida.

TALLAHASSEE MSA PRECINCT ANALYSIS

Based on previous research and using available precinct-level election results data from the 2000 election, a regression on the 183 Tallahassee precincts was run. Because of the smaller population in the dataset, the regression did not result in as strong a model as did the regression in Chapter Three, which had 969 precincts in the dataset. Despite this, the Tallahassee model shows incontrovertibly that one variable (percent African American) stands out more than any of the others as it did in the North Florida model. In addition, the rest of the variables found to be significant (average median age, percent female, population density and average median family income) roughly parallel those that constituted the North Florida model.

Not surprisingly, percent African American remains the strongest predictor of decreased Republican vote share, with a standardized beta coefficient of nearly .6. It is clearly as important a factor in predicting how a precinct will vote for president in Tallahassee as it is in North Florida. This is not the only notable result. Following percent African American is population density which demonstrated a negative relationship with Republican vote share.

This negative relationship is not surprising. Rural areas are associated with greater conservatism (which translates to an increase in Republican vote share). However, recall that Tallahassee has a large percentage of African Americans in the population, many of whom live in the less densely populated, rural areas of the Tallahassee MSA such as Gadsden and Jefferson Counties. This increased rural African American population may act to weaken the negative relationship between population density and Republican vote share. What is also notable is that the relationship between population density and Republican vote share is larger in the Tallahassee regression versus North Florida’s.

One explanation for this is that there was lower voter turnout in more rural areas of the Tallahassee MSA among those who would normally have voted for the Democratic candidate

versus the Republican. Unfortunately, it is only possible to know voter turnout rates for a specific precinct and not whether or not a particular voter voted which would aid in knowing how voter turnout affected Republican vote share. This notable difference in the increase in the importance of population density highlights the point of comparing Tallahassee to North Florida. There is something occurring with this variable that is not entirely clear.

To expand on this, note in Table 4.2b that the relationships between percent African American and population density have weakened while the relationships between population density and income and age have strengthened somewhat. That, in Tallahassee, as population density increases, the percent of African Americans does not increase as much indicates that there may be more rural African American voters. For North Florida, the relationship between race and population density was stronger, indicating fewer African Americans in more rural areas. Because population density’s relationship with the other variables changed from the North Florida to the Tallahassee MSA model, it has a stronger (although still not as strong as race) ability to predict Republican vote share in the Tallahassee MSA. This is possibly related to high density areas of the MSA where there are younger people (college students) with lower incomes (African Americans and college students) and more females).

Percent female demonstrated a moderately stronger indirect relationship with Republican vote share than it did in the North Florida regression model. Again, although this is not a strong negative relationship, it is most likely related to the younger population of Tallahassee, paired with the significantly larger percentage of females compared to North Florida (as demonstrated by a t-test comparing the mean percentage of women in North Florida census block groups to block groups of the Tallahassee MSA).

The remainder of the independent variables (average median age and average median family income) did not demonstrate significance at the .05 level and did not demonstrate any strong relationships with Republican voting in Tallahassee. As with the North Florida regression model this is likely due to the general non-linearity between these two variables and voting in the United States (as was discussed in Chapter Two). Later in this chapter, the discussion will return

to the regression model to discuss how well it predicts voting behavior compared to observed Republican vote share.

Table 4.2a: Multivariate Regression of Predictive Variables on Republican Vote Share (Tallahassee MSA) Independent Variable Republican Vote Share

% African American -.578 (.001)***

% Female -.171 (.001)***

Average Median Age .092 (.174)

Average Median Family Income .117 (.061)

Population Density -.211 (.001)*** ______Note: Adjusted R-squared .663 n=183 *p<.05. **p<.01. ***p<.001.

The correlation matrix of independent variables for the Tallahassee MSA regression model shows different relationships than the matrix for the North Florida model. This may explain why certain other independent variables (such as population density) have stronger relationships with Republican vote share in the Tallahassee model. The coefficient between race and population density is weaker while the relationship between race and income and age is stronger. Likewise, the relationships between population density and age and income are also stronger than in the North Florida correlation matrix. This variety of stronger coefficients among all of the independent variables in the Tallahassee model helps to explain why the standardized

coefficients between the independent variables and Republican vote share were all a little bit stronger in the Tallahassee model.

Table 4.2b: Intercorrelation of Independent Variables (Tallahassee MSA) Average %African Population Median % Female Average Median American Density Family Age Income

% African 1 .110 -.603** .087** -.478** American

Population 1 -.300** .191** -.567** Density

Average Median 1 -.025 .633** Family Income

% Female 1 .009

Average Median 1 Age ______**p<.01.

Again however, the relationship between percent African-American and population density is different in the Tallahassee MSA than in North Florida. The correlation between the two is moderately strong in North Florida but is weaker in Tallahassee. Also, population density is more strongly correlated to average median family income and average median age. Somehow, this must come into play in causing this notable difference in the part that population density plays into Republican vote share in the Tallahassee MSA versus North Florida. This will be discussed further in Chapter Five.

All of this may also be related to the fact that the Tallahassee regression is not only based on a smaller population but on one that is somewhat more racially diverse, with a larger population of those 18-24 years old and over one-third of those over 25 years old who have at least a bachelor’s degree and a larger population (nearly 30%) making less than $20,000 per year (see Tables 4.4, 4.5a & 4.5b). The effects of these differences are discussed later in this chapter.

Tallahassee as an Electoral Deviant

Chapter Two discussed the voting tendencies shared by North Florida with the South against the backdrop of the United States. Since the mid-1960’s and the Civil Rights era, North Florida not only displayed support for the same presidential candidates as the South, but regularly showed more support than the South itself for the Republican or “Southern” presidential candidate. Although it is in North Florida, Tallahassee has not always sympathized with the region’s choice for president. Table 4.3 provides a comparison of presidential support between Tallahassee and North Florida against the background of the South.

Since the passing of the Civil & Voting Rights Acts, Tallahassee’s first spark of difference from North Florida occurred in 1980 in the election between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter who had garnered a solid 60% of North Florida votes when he was first elected in 1976. Tallahassee was again aligned with North Florida and the South in 1984 and 1988 supporting the popular Reagan and his vice-president, George H.W. Bush in his first bid for president. Though Tallahassee supported the Republican candidates in these two presidential contests, Republican support in Tallahassee was considerably less than in the remainder of North Florida as a whole and was, in fact, more like the South. Tallahassee again deviated from North Florida in 1992, 1996 and 2000, and maintained its alignment with the South in terms of presidential support.

The 1992 presidential election could arguably be considered not simply a mere deviation from North Florida, but a mini-realigning election for Tallahassee. Similar to how the 1968 election of Richard Nixon was a realigning election of the United States that ended a series of Democratic presidential wins and delivered the South firmly in the hands of the Republicans,

1992 was a watershed year in which Tallahassee deviated for good and began a new trend that set it apart from North Florida, which continued to be a Republican voting region. This trend continued in the 2004 and 2008 elections, in which Tallahassee voted for the Democratic presidential candidate as North Florida (and the South) continued to vote Republican (Division of Elections 2009).

Table 4.3: Presidential Support: 1968-2008

Election Year Tallahassee* North Florida* South** 1968 Wallace Wallace (≈50%) Rep-37% Dem-33% 1972 Republican Republican (≈70%) Republican (61%) 1976 Democrat Democrat (≈60%) Democrat (50%) 1980 Democrat (53%) Republican (54%) Republican (51%) 1984 Republican (54%) Republican (67%) Republican (59%) 1988 Republican (52%) Republican (65%) Republican (53%) 1992 Democrat (50%) Republican (61%) Democrat (43%) 1996 Democrat (55%) Republican (48%) Democrat (49%) 2000 Democrat (59%) Republican (60%) Republican (48%) 2004 Democrat (61%) Republican (61%) Republican (54%) 2008 Democrat (60%) Republican (58%) Republican (53%) Note: Exact data unavailable for Tallahassee & North Florida for 1968, 1972 & 1976. *Florida Division of Elections **Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

The 2000 election presented a challenge to the United States’ electoral system when the candidates’ (George W. Bush and Al Gore) campaigns fought a legal battle over votes in South Florida. This was not the case in North Florida where Bush received 60% of the region’s votes. Nor was it the case in Tallahassee where nearly the same percentage of votes went to the Democratic candidate. Based on the electoral history of Tallahassee and North Florida, it is clear that there are differences in the voting population which expressed themselves in 2000 in the form of presidential support.

TALLAHASSEE MSA DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

A quick comparison of the Democratic Tallahassee to the Republican North Florida explains much. In fact, Table 4.4 essentially speaks for itself. In each of the demographic variables that were found in the previous chapter to be significant predictors of voting behavior, Tallahassee differs strongly from North Florida (or the South as a whole). Namely, Tallahassee differs in terms of race (it has a much higher percentage of African Americans), gender (it has more female voters), and age (it has more young voters), and each of these characteristics correlates with a greater propensity to vote Democratic in presidential elections.

Beginning with gender, the Tallahassee MSA has 2% more females than North Florida. A t-test of the variance of percent female for North Florida compared to the Tallahassee MSA block groups demonstrated that this difference is significant. Otherwise, this would not seem to be much of a difference; however, it is indicative given that gender is not a variable which typically varies much by region. The higher percentage of females in Tallahassee versus North Florida can perhaps best be explained by the presence of two large state universities which would predict an increased presence of females. Conversely, Tallahassee is the only major population center in North Florida without a major military installation which could also explain its relative lack of males. Additionally, recall from Chapter Two that, while men are more likely to be Republican voters, women, on the other hand, are more likely to sympathize and vote with Democratic ideology. This remained the case in Tallahassee. Table 4.2 shows that within the Tallahassee MSA, precincts with a higher percentage of women were more likely to vote Democratic, and that the effect of the gender variable was statistically significant. This is similar to the national level results arrived at by Smith (1999).

The greatest difference in age between Tallahassee and North Florida is in the older and younger age cohorts. For the cohorts age 25 to 64, there is little variation between Tallahassee and North Florida or the South. There is less than a 2% difference across the regions for the cohorts. Not surprisingly, Tallahassee has a considerably larger college-age population because of the two large state universities. Compared to Tallahassee, North Florida has a more normal population distribution which is not too dissimilar from that of the South. One explanation for

the decreased share of people over age 65 is likely due simply to the fact that there are more young voters. Another possible cause is that a large percent of Tallahassee’s workforce (most of them government employees) originally are from outside the city and do not remain in Tallahassee when they retire.

Table 4.4: Demographic Makeup of Tallahassee, North Florida and the South

Race, Gender & Age 18 & Up Tallahassee North Florida South White 65.8% 75.2% 75.0% Black 30.2% 19.9% 17.4% Male 47.2% 49.2% 48.2% Female 52.8% 50.8% 51.8% >65yo 6.3% 8.4% 9.1% 55-64 5.2% 6.4% 6.5% 45-54 9.2% 9.7% 9.7% 35-44 10.1% 11.7% 11.6% 25-34 9.8% 10.3% 10.5% 18-24 12.5% 7.7% 7.2% Source: 2000 US Census

The most notable and possibly key variable that sets Tallahassee apart from North Florida is the percentage of African Americans. Compared to the South, North Florida has a larger African American population without a resulting decrease in the percentage of whites, indicating that there are fewer people of other minorities in North Florida. In Tallahassee, African Americans account for one-third of the population of the area with a decrease in percent share of whites in the population with the same percent of other minorities as North Florida. As stated above, Table 4.4 truly speaks for itself.

Continuing to consider demographic variables alone, Tallahassee has all of the characteristics of a Democratic region as reported in the literature. This small region of North Florida has a higher percentage of women, it has a larger share of younger voters and, most

importantly, and alone the strongest predictor of non-Republican voting in Tallahassee is the one-third of the population that is African American. These variables will be discussed again, later in the chapter in conjunction with the socio-economic variables not included in the regression model or Table 4.4.

TALLAHASSEE MSA SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS

Tallahassee is a college town with two universities. Two universities equals a high number of individuals with master’s degrees and doctorates who teach and work at those colleges which then produce young people with bachelor’s degrees. In addition to university employees, Tallahassee is also the seat of government for the state, and as such, it is reasonable to assume that most of the state government employees and lobbyists also have two and four- year degrees which would add to the higher percentage of college educated persons.

Table 4.5a: Educational Attainment for Population Age 25 and Older

Educational Attainment Tallahassee North Florida South Less than High School Diploma 15% 19% 22% High School Degree 23% 30% 29% Some College or Associate's 27% 30% 27% Bachelor's Degree or Higher 34% 21% 23% Source: 2000 US Census

Table 4.5a’s continuum of educational attainment in Tallahassee appears to be logically distributed for a college town with the smallest group of people being those without a high school degree increasing to the largest group having the most education. Compared to the Tallahassee MSA, the Republican regions of the South and North Florida have a more normal distribution of educational attainment with barely over 20% of both populations having at least a two-year degree. Next to them, it is not surprising that Tallahassee is a Democratic region

considering its more highly educated population. Presumably the reason why education did not emerge as a significant variable for predicting variance among the Tallahassee precincts is that low-education precincts are more likely to have high numbers of African Americans (who also trend Democratic), canceling out the predictive power of the education variable in the regression model.

Tallahassee is not much different from North Florida regarding annual household income (Table 4.5b). It would seem a given, though, that if a region or place like Tallahassee has a considerable percentage of college educated people, then the median income would be correspondingly higher (USCB 2002). This is not the case in Tallahassee which, although it has a higher median income than North Florida, still has a larger percentage of households making less than $20,000 per year. In fact, based on national trends in recent years, Tallahassee would be more likely to vote Republican than North Florida with a higher percentage of low income households.

Table 4.5b: Median Household Income and Income Levels

Income Tallahassee North Florida South Median HH Income $34,728 $33,044 $38,790 <$20,000/yr 28% 25% 25% $50,000-$75,000/yr 18% 19% 19% >$100,000/yr 9% 8% 10% Source: 2000 US Census

But the capitol region’s higher percentage of low income households is probably linked to its larger percentage of people under age 24, which Tallahassee has plenty of, compared to North Florida. According the U.S. Census Bureau (2000), at the national level, the group of households headed by someone under the age of 24 had the lowest median income. In addition to the younger population dragging down the median income, Tallahassee’s considerable African

American population (30%) also contributes to the decreased median income as African Americans are typically overrepresented in lower income brackets in the United States (USCB, 2000). As with educational attainment, both of these low-income groups trend Democratic, masking the predictive power of the income variable in the regression model.

Conventional wisdom in America is that church membership and religiosity (church attendance) have a strong positive relationship to conservative social and political ideology which, in turn, eventually equates to Republican voting. If North Florida and Tallahassee were compared only on the percent of the total population that belongs to a church, Tallahassee might be assumed to be at least as Republican and conservative a region as North Florida. This would hide the effect that the racial makeup of the region has on its religious denomination makeup.

Table 4.5c: Church Membership by Denomination

Denomination Tallahassee North Florida South Percent of Total Population 59.4% 57.0% 62.3% Catholic 4.5% 6.0% 12.2% Methodist 4.6% 5.0% 5.8% Baptist 13.4% 20.0% 8.6% Jewish 0.7% 0.4% 1.3% Historically African American 22.7% 13.0% 11.8% Source: Glenmary Research Center, 2002

Christianity is the most widely held faith in North Florida, with the Baptist and Methodist denominations having larger percentages of white membership than other Christian denominations in the region (Warf 2007). Catholicism and Judaism, faiths whose adherents are more likely to vote Democrat, are not well represented in the region and less so in Tallahassee. It is the historically African American denomination which actually has a plurality of the 59% of the population that belongs to a church. Naturally, this is directly related to the 30% of the population that is African American.

This is an important intersection of race and religion. According to a recent Pew (2009) study, most members of historically African American Protestant denominations identify as being politically and ideologically conservative (about 35%), the same as members of mainline denominations such as Baptist and Methodist. Unlike mainline denominations, though, 78% of members of African American Protestant denominations identify strongly with or lean towards the Democratic Party. Mainline Protestants are split with 43% leaning Democratic while 43% identify as or lean Republican. So it is clear that there is a strong relationship between race and religion. Despite that so many members of African American denominations are ideologically conservative, this is overcome by race and the strong identification that African Americans generally have with the Democratic Party.

As with religiosity and income, the Tallahassee MSA’s overall lower level of urbanization, relative to North Florida, would be expected to make it slightly more Republican based solely on that characteristic. But as observed with other characteristics of the population, Tallahassee’s is not representative of the entire population of North Florida. This being the case, the negative relationship between population density and Republican vote share in the Tallahassee MSA is influenced by the high number of African American voters who live in the more rural areas of the MSA.

Table 4.5d: Population Density (Urban vs. Rural)

Location Tallahassee North Florida South Urban 69% 76% 73% Rural 31% 24% 27% Source: 2000 US Census

Although together the four counties that are the Tallahassee MSA are more rural than North Florida, this is because the three counties surrounding the capitol have a lower population density. It is the population characteristics of two of the four counties that keep Tallahassee in

the Democratic column. Gadsden County has the only majority of African Americans in North Florida and Leon County (with the City of Tallahassee) is where most of the college educated population resides. Together, these two factors are what cancel out the higher percentage of rural-ness that would otherwise predict Republican support from the MSA’s voting population. Also, a significant percentage of the rural population in Gadsden and Jefferson Counties are African American and is not representative of the typical rural population of North Florida.

Regression Model and Predicted vs. Observed Republican Vote Share

The following figure is a visualization of the predicted and observed Republican vote share for the Tallahassee MSA voting precincts, based on data merged into the precincts from 2000 US Census block group data. Additionally, the larger map of the MSA, on the bottom, shows in which precincts the model over or under-predicted the Republican vote share. For instance, in precincts where the residual between the predicted value and the observed value is from 0%-20% or more less than the predicted value the precinct is shaded red. Likewise, the light to dark blue precincts are those in which the predicted Republican vote share was 0%-17% more than the observed Republican vote share.

The most important note of Figure 4.2 is the map of the difference between the predicted and the observed Republican vote share based on the regression model of the Tallahassee MSA precincts. Generally, the variables underpredict Republican vote share. However, the difference between predicted and observed value in most of the precincts is relatively small. There are several possible explanations for the underpredicted Republican vote share.

First is the fairly diverse population of the MSA. About a quarter of the four-county area’s population is African American. It is possible that, while the model is fairly accurate in the overall effect of the presence of a large African American population, the potential effect of this important leg of party politics in the South is dependent on whether or not members of this potentially extremely influential demographic vote. Whatever the reasons for decreased voter turnout among any group of people (difficulty in getting to the voting precinct, voter apathy, or disenfranchisement) if the votes or opinions of individuals are not registered, then even if

African Americans were a majority of the population, it would not affect the outcome of the vote.

Figure 4.2: Predicted, Observed and Residual Values for Republican Vote Share for the Tallahassee MSA

Second, the model takes into account only the demographic and socio-economic aspects of the population and not necessarily the culture of the population in the MSA; specifically, the general perception of the Tallahassee as being in the center of a Southern and very religious region. Unfortunately, as discussed in Chapter Two, religious denomination is not always an

accurate measurement of political attitude and, as such, would be a difficult variable to measure in an analysis such as this. As with the regression for North Florida in Chapter Three, a key factor that is not taken into account by the model is voter turnout.

Finally, the model underpredicts Republican vote share in the geographically larger precincts that have lower population densities. This could be related to hidden variables such as an ultra-conservative religious culture or decreased voter turnout among voters who would otherwise not vote Republican. This possibility seems likely as the difference between a majority Republican vote share rather than a minority one was marginal compared to some of the precincts with higher population densities. It might have only taken a handful of other-than- Republican votes to swing those precincts into the blue.

Conclusion: The Other North Florida

Tallahassee has the demographic and socio-economic characteristics that outline it as a Democratic region. The least of these are income, gender and age with the greatest being education, race and religion, in no particular order. The relationship between gender, race and age as predictors of Republican vote share demonstrates that, of the three, race is the best predictor of decreased Republican vote share. While gender and average median age do predict voting one way or the other in Tallahassee, they are weak variables. Despite this, it is clear that, between North Florida and Tallahassee, two of these are notably different. Average median family income and population density, while not inconclusive, do not lend themselves to explaining why Tallahassee voted Democratic in the 2000 presidential election. It is education, religious denomination and race that are the Democratic characteristics of Tallahassee.

However, it is not adequate to simply say that Tallahassee has a more educated population that is nearly one-third African American, many of whom are members of African American Protestant congregations and that these three characteristics explain why this small part of North Florida did not vote for George W. Bush nearly a decade ago. It would be correct to say that these are key and the first steps towards understanding the region’s political landscape through the cultural one. These variables all play off of each other and play off of the variables

that are weak predictors of Republican vote share. Arguably, the high rate of membership in the African American churches is not directly a cause of Democratic voting but rather is a function of the larger African American population.

Although some characteristics of Tallahassee are predictive of a Republican voting preference, these can be explained away through a closer examination of the data. Even though Tallahassee has a large share of households with income under $20,000 per year (which typically correlates with Republican voting), in Tallahassee this population is primarily due to the larger share of people between 18 and 24 years old and the larger African American population, both of which groups tend to vote Democratic. Similarly, the slightly higher percentage (than North Florida) of the population that belongs to a church is not because of more people who belong to white mainline Protestant churches but because of the higher share of African Americans, most of the churchgoing of which belong to African American Protestant churches. In other words, the relationships between what make a place Republican or Democratic are complex and there are limits to the predictions that one can make by looking at a single variables.

Despite the characteristics of its population however, there is one additional argument to be made about why the Tallahassee MSA votes the way that it does. It is possible that any correlation between population characteristics and voting are purely coincidental and the people of the region are simply like-minded. In his book, The Big Sort, Bill Bishop (2008) makes the argument that the reason for finding areas such as the Tallahassee MSA that are so different- minded from their surrounding regions is because people of a certain mindedness tend to collect in areas or places where people of a mindedness similar to theirs already reside. Most likely this is, in part, only a contributing factor to the reason why Tallahassee appears to be so different from the rest of North Florida but it is still a point worth noting.

DISCUSSION and CONCLUSION

The three main questions that this study set out to answer were: “Why does the Tallahassee MSA vote the way it does?”, “Do the variables that explain North Florida’s electoral geography explain Tallahassee?”, and “What are the problems of scale (where the real scale is the individual and not the precinct)”. The first and second questions have been answered satisfactorily in Chapters Three and Four. The third question will require some discussion to determine how well it has been answered.

Understanding Predictors of Voting

First, the answer to the second question as to whether or not the variables that affect Republican vote share in North Florida also have the same effect in the Tallahassee MSA is yes. Without first understanding the overall voting trends at the national level and the South, it would have been relatively difficult to pick out specific variables with which to first analyze what it is about the population of North Florida that affects Republican vote share.

Including voter turnout to this discussion may be helpful as well. This factor received a paragraph of attention at the end of Chapter Two, as well as brief mentions in Chapters Three and Four. In the future though, especially dealing with precinct data and understanding why models underpredict voting, looking at voter turnout on a precinct-by-precinct or county-by- county basis could aid in knowing why predicted values differ from those observed. Perhaps paired with rural areas where voters must travel farther to cast their vote or where lower incomes and levels of education are lower, voter participation rates could provide valuable insight to regression models like those presented in this paper.

Knowing how well the model predicted Republican vote share among the precincts of North Florida allowed for a thorough analysis of how the same variables predict Republican vote share in the Tallahassee MSA. This allowed for the primary question of the study to be answered. In addition, the method of conflating US Census data to the voting precincts allowed for

Republican vote share to be viewed in the context of the entire population and essentially the entire demographic and socio-economic backdrop of North Florida and the Tallahassee MSA.

How the Predictors Work in Tallahassee

Returning to the first question, “Why does Tallahassee vote the way it does?” the answer is relatively simple: place matters. Strictly speaking, the people who live and vote in a particular place matter. In the case of the Tallahassee MSA what matters most (according to the statistical model in Chapter Four) is the presence of a large African American population. In fact, it is possible that the African American population is so large in this particular place that the potential effect of decreased voter turnout is diminished by the volume of African Americans who don’t vote Republican.

Additional contributions to the decreased Republican vote share in the MSA come from a complex combination of many interrelated variables. That the population of the area is generally younger (especially in and around the universities in the city of Tallahassee, that the population generally has a higher educational attainment and subsequently that there is generally a higher median income among most of those with a higher educational attainment. So in the case of the Tallahassee MSA, place, and the people who make the place what it is matter a great deal.

Still there may be other forces at work which remain to be understood based solely on the analyses presented in this paper. Recall that population density played a different role in Republican vote share in the Tallahassee MSA compared North Florida with a stronger, negative relationship to Republican vote share. Population density also demonstrated a different relationship to each of the other variables in the regression, having a weaker relationship to percent African American in a precinct and stronger, indirect relationships with age and income. The relationships between race and income and age and between population density and income and age may be worth investigating more thoroughly in future studies like this one. Of course population density isn’t what causes the variation in Republican vote share; instead, it is an indicator of the type of people who would or would not vote Republican.

To highlight this point, 17 of the least Republican precincts and 18 of the Republican precincts were selected to examine some descriptive statistics about each group. In brief, the population breakdown for the less Republican precincts: 54% female, 83% African American, an average Average Median Age of 28 and an average Average Median Family Income of $27,346 with an average population density of 2200 people per square mile. For the most Republican precincts: 50% female, 13% African American, an average Average Median Age of 38 and an average Average Median Family Income of $47,051 with an average population density of 109 people per square mile.

To be fair though, it is necessary to also look at the 20 Republican precincts which also had a high population density relative to the rural Republican precincts. Their population breakdown is: 51% Female, 6% African American, an average Average Median Age of 41 and an average Average Median Family Income of $89593 with an average population density of 756 people per square mile.

What does this say about the Tallahassee MSA? This spot of blue on a habitually red electoral landscape has its own divisions which are accentuated at the local level. The division is essentially one of urban versus rural and specifically, is about what each of those two things mean for the Tallahassee MSA. What urban means is that voters are younger, there are more African Americans and more females, all three of which can be tied to decreased levels of income and educational attainment. It is a recipe for Democratic votes. For the rural parts of the MSA is the fact that there are many more whites, especially older whites, and these can be tied to higher income and higher levels of educational attainment. All together, these precincts with lower population density, as well as those closer to the urban center of the MSA can account for many Republican votes. For Tallahassee, the urban/rural divide matters a great deal.

Understanding Each Vote

The third issue of scale is that each of the precincts in the analysis are still an aggregation of census data merged with an overall Republican vote share in each precinct. The model is not looking at the different individuals that each cast an individual vote, which leads to inferences

about how a hypothetical individual will cast their vote. The basic problem is that it is not possible for the current model to explain individual voters who are the outliers in each precinct, the simple fact that some individuals do not vote or that there is generally low voter turnout among specific groups of individuals. These are the questions that are difficult to answer without specific knowledge of each voter.

To truly understand voter behavior at the appropriate scale (not at the level of precincts) it would be necessary to know each of the individual voters. It does not matter what is known about a population whether it is religiosity, income, race, age or any variable or characteristic. What matters in the end is the make-up of the voting-age population and who in that population votes in a particular election. Although the voting population will change to some degree from one election cycle to the next, the voting trend of the core voting population can be expected to remain consistent over time; however, those that only vote in elections that are important to them can be expected to be different to some degree in each election cycle.

So looking at a statistical model to determine which demographic variables explain most of the variance in a model or comparing general statistics that are a snapshot of a population at a given moment in time can put one on the right track to understanding what makes those that do vote, vote the way that they do.

Because casting a vote is probably one of the most honest acts a person can do in one’s entire life it may not necessarily be based solely on one’s demographic or socio-economic position in life. For instance, a person may be more likely to vote Democratic because she is a black woman, has a Ph.D., and lives in an urban area. But she is only more likely to vote Democratic. There is always the possibility that she is an outlier and instead votes Republican or maybe not even at all, because of a personal history unknowable to a researcher. There may be some extenuating circumstances that the statistics hide which can, in no way, begin to explain why that person cast her vote for a Republican instead of a Democrat.

Scale, Resolution and Location

It is also clear that, based on the comparisons of the South, North Florida and Tallahassee, regions are not truly homogenous. While North Florida is, for all intents and purposes, a microcosm of the South, Tallahassee has demonstrated that it is neither Southern nor North Floridian. Like North Florida, the Tallahassee MSA appears, as a whole, to be as solidly Democratic as North Florida would, as a whole, appear to be solidly Republican. Furthermore, even without switching to a larger geographic scale, one can see that Tallahassee is not homogenous.

This would be accomplished by switching to a higher resolution: looking at smaller units of analysis such as each of the four counties, or each of the voting precincts. If one were to look at the Tallahassee MSA broken up into four counties, or the 183 individual precincts, they would see that not all of the precincts had less than a majority Republican vote share. If one examined the population of the Republican voting precincts, they might appear to have the same demographic and socio-economic composition as North Florida or possess a high level of the characteristics that predict Republican voting.

Beginning with the focus of this paper, Figure 5.1 shows the single unit that is the Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area symbolized using a light blue color to represent a somewhat low level of Republican support from the MSA as a whole.

Figure 5.1: Tallahassee MSA Republican Vote Share

Figure 5.2: County-level Republican Vote Share for the Tallahassee MSA

An example of switching to a higher resolution yet remaining at the same geographic scale is shown in Figure 5.2 with the four counties of the Tallahassee MSA each symbolized

according to the level of Republican support shown in each of the counties. Wakulla County demonstrated a higher level of Republican support than did Leon, Jefferson or Gadsden Counties; however, Gadsden showed the lowest level of Republican support while Leon and Jefferson remained somewhat in the middle of the four.

Of course there is an even higher resolution in which to display Republican vote share for the Tallahassee MSA; the precinct level. The map of precinct level Republican vote share in Figure 5.3 tells so much more about the electoral landscape of Tallahassee. It does not tell much that is not already known however. In fact, to a person who is familiar with this particular MSA, it simply reminds them that the urban center of the MSA is the city of Tallahassee in the middle of Leon County where the geographically smallest precincts are clustered together and that the rest of the area has a relatively lower population density, hence the geographically much larger precincts in Gadsden, Jefferson and Wakulla Counties.

If a cartogram were created with the precincts resized according to the number of registered voters in each precinct, then the large, light pink precinct in western Wakulla County would be much smaller than some of the dark blue precincts in the center of Leon County or in Gadsden County. The reason that there is such a large unpopulated precinct such as that is because it lies in the eastern part of a large national forest. Likewise, the large, light blue precinct in southern Jefferson County is nearly as unpopulated.

Figure 5.3: Precinct-level Republican Vote Share for the Tallahassee MSA

Conclusion

So to a certain extent, place also matters when studying an electoral landscape. Knowing something about the study area, such as where the population clusters and national forests are found can help to explain much more than looking at aggregate data for a population whether by census block group, county, MSA or by cultural region such as North Florida.

Just as switching to a different resolution at the same geographic scale may present a different perspective on the electoral geography of a place or region, looking at a different location may present a different perspective on the characteristics or variables that affect the electoral geography of a place or region. Take for instance the socio-economic characteristic of income and the effect it has on voting. Recall in Chapter Two that the effect income has on voting changes with location and sometimes with scale. For example, in regions with lower

median incomes, those with the highest income tend to lean Republican but wealthy people in areas with higher median incomes tend to vote Democratic.

It is unfortunate that this study may not translate exactly onto any other region with the same demographic and socio-economic characteristics. However to thoroughly answer a question such as this, may take more in depth knowledge of any such area including the one that is the subject of this study.

According to Gary King (2000), the smallest unit of political geography in the United States of America is the voting precinct. While it may be the smallest unit of analysis available, this is not the case. In reality, the smallest unit of political geography is the voter. As the map of the precincts of the Tallahassee MSA shows, there are nearly 200 precincts in the MSA. Together, the precincts in these four counties had a total of 193,263 units of analysis (registered voters) on November 7th 2000 (Florida Senate 2008); and this study has made an important step in order to better study and understand the smallest unit of analysis in political geography. Precincts are not people. Voters are people and only when the voter can be known can the vote be understood and patterns on the political landscape of the region be interpreted.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

John Winsor McEwen was born and raised in East Texas. He attended Jacksonville University in Florida where he earned his undergraduate degree in Geography and received a commission as an officer in the United States Navy Reserve. He currently serves as an Intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve.

John has traveled across most of the United States. His travels abroad have taken him from the Prime Meridian to the Equator and he serves as a chaperone for an alternative Spring Break trip to Ecuador with Jacksonville University. John has always had an interest in culture, traveling and geography. He hopes to continue the tradition of academic research as well as growing public awareness of the importance of geography in the everyday lives of every person.