The New Geography of American.

The election of 2000 was not only one of the closest and most controversial elections in American history, it revealed major geographic and demographic fractures in the American electorate. The famous Red-Blue Map of the counties won by Bush and Gore has produced diverse and in some instances interpretations. Some, like Barone and Brooks, see the map as evidence of a growing Republican majority, with fastest growing parts of the country also the most Republican. Brooks argues that fast growing sprinkler cities reflect the beau ideal of Republican selfhood, and are becoming the new base-- the brains, guts, and soul of the emerging Republican Party. The rising prominence of these places heralds a new style of suburb vs. suburb politics with the explosively growing Republican suburbs vying with the slower growing and increasingly Democratic suburbs for control of the center of American political gravity. Others, like Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority, argue almost the opposite. They suggest that the most dynamic areas of the country-- high tech areas they call ideopolises-- are becoming more Democratic. The proposed paper reports the results of an ongoing research project, which seeks to untangle the arguments about the the political consequences of population change and match them against available data. The paper begins with a very brief overview of the dimensions of population migration and growth in the last several decades. It then offers a review of the literature about the new political geography and uses county level data about elections and campaign finance to add better empirical evidence to the debate about the future of the American electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]