During and after visiting San Francisco last summer for several weeks I commented that, nice as it is, and as much as I enjoyed seeing old (and new) friends out there, the Bay Area is like another country. The California Secretary of State’s map of the recall election returns confirms that observation (Link via Daniel Weintraub).
Unlike the famous Red and Blue maps of the 2000 election, this one is red (No on Recall) and Green (Yes on Recall). Except for Los Angeles County in the south, the Red counties are huddled around San Francisco Bay, plus two coastal counties to the north and two coastal counties to the south. In addition, a couple counties immediately adjacent to those Bay/Coastal counties opposed the recall. Only one anti-recall county (Yolo) was more than one county inland, and as of 12:58 today its voted was recorded as 50.2% anti-recall. Altogether, the anti-recallers were in a majority in only 15 of 58 counties, and on the second question Bustamante won a plurality in only 8 counties. As Weintraub points out,
Schwarzenegger won a plurality in 50 of the 58 counties, and took an outright majority in 36 of them. All of the counties where he finished second to Cruz are clustered around San Francisco Bay or around the north and central coasts…. [I]t appears that if you took away Los Angeles County and those counties which touch SF Bay, the recall would have passed 60-40, and perhaps by an even greater margin.
Actually, L.A. County barely make a dent on those figures. The recall may not have passed there, but at 51%-49%, it was very close. Combine L.A.’s numbers with those of any one adjacent county (Orange, Kern, San Bernardino, Riverside or Ventura) and the whole area turns green.
Word is the Bay Area is really, really mad at, well, all of California except the Bay Area. Heh.
Let’s hope the big one hits and drops that whole Bay area into the Pacific. I bet race relations would improve, not only in California but also in much of the rest of the U.S. with the worst of the racial agitators gone…