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

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The Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area: an Exception on the Electoral Landscape of North Florida John W Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2010 The Tallahassee Metropolitan Statistical Area: An Exception on the Electoral Landscape of North Florida John W. McEwen Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND PUBLIC POLICY THE TALLAHASSEE METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA: AN EXCEPTION ON THE ELECTORAL LANDSCAPE OF NORTH FLORIDA By 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. ii 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. iii 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 iv 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 v Table 4.5d – Population Density (Urban vs. Rural) …………………………................46 vi 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 vii 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. viii 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 1 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
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