Opinion: 'Red state, blue state' myth is making things worse

Hey, you there, Ms. Professor living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and shaking your head at all those Trump voters in Oklahoma. The guy who lives next door to you and has a law degree from Yale voted for Donald Trump. He liked the fact that Trump lowered his taxes. One of your favorite colleagues at the university where you teach also voted for Trump because she’s resentful that the last four hires weren’t born in the United States.

And for you, the owner of an irrigation-supply business in Iowa who had a Trump sign in the yard and thinks New Yorkers and Californians are ruining the country, here’s some news: Plenty of people you do business with are Joe Biden voters, including your best customer, who farms over 1,000 acres and agrees with Warren Buffett that secretaries should not be paying a bigger percentage of their income in taxes than billionaires do. Your banker, who started as a teller 30 years ago and is now bank president, voted for Biden because he can’t relate to someone who doesn’t pay back loans and jets to his golf course on weekends.

In blue state Connecticut, 39% of voters last November cast their ballot for Trump. In other states labeled blue, Trump also got a big portion of the vote: 41% in New Jersey, 40% in Oregon, 37% in New York, 32% in Massachusetts.

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In the so-called deep red state of Mississippi, Biden got 41% of the presidential vote. Here’s how he did in other states colored red on electoral maps: 45% in Iowa, 41% in Kansas, 37% in Tennessee, 36% in Alabama, 35% in South Dakota.

In using the terms "red state" and "blue state," we are looking at the population through a seriously distorted lens. Only in the world of the much-flawed, winner-take-all Electoral College are there red states and blue states. Many of us — journalists, politicians, the average person on the street — decry the Electoral College, but then we adopt the same all-or-nothing thinking.

Outside of the Electoral College, the terms red state and blue state perpetuate the myth that the great majority of Biden voters are the so-called coastal elites, living along the Pacific or in the Northeast Corridor, and that the great majority of Trump voters are under-educated rednecks living in the hinterlands. This assignment of separate geographies ignores reality and perpetuates our political and social divisions, reinforcing a roadblock to the current administration’s goal of fostering unity.

A few days after the election, a New York Times reporter wanted to get a reaction from Trump voters. So she visited a sparsely populated part of Nebraska to talk to Republicans there. More than one in three voters in New York State voted for Trump, so she could have gotten a “Trump voter reaction story” without getting on a plane. In her article, she referred to Yutan, Nebraska, population 1,285, as “a Republican stronghold just like the overwhelming majority of the state.” Not true. Thirty percent of the voters in Nebraska are registered Democrats.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, where I live, on the day after the election Trump supporters were rallying on the north side of the state Capitol, which faces a busy thoroughfare. At the same time, across the street in a public plaza, Biden supporters were celebrating. The following day, Black Lives Matter demonstrators occupied the space where the Trump supporters had been.

Among all the polls taken last fall, here’s one from Hofstra University in September: Forty percent of Americans support or somewhat support the idea that their state should take steps toward secession if their preferred presidential candidate did not win. Of course, there are Facebook pages with such labels as Red State Secession and Blue State Secession, where followers talk as if the wrong-thinking voters don’t live next door.

The deep division in this country isn’t neatly segregated by state. Understanding this will be a necessary step in bridging that division. Neither the Trump voter nor the Biden voter is The Other in a faraway place, and you don’t live in a blue state or a red state. Like every American, you live in a purple state.

Theresa Forsman is a retired journalist living in Lincoln, Nebraska.