Obama's Secret Weapon In The South is 129 Million Years Old

[brudgers]

Considering that Obama was trounced in those states and thus won no votes in the Electorial College, it is hardly a "secret weapon." Were it one, the consistency of its Democratic lean in previous elections, would call into question that it was his.

The article just promotes an ignorant sort of racial understanding while missing the really curious relationship between agriculture and his campaigns.

Obama's secret weapon has been Iowa.

[tosseraccount]

Or money+incumbency

Roosevelt,Truman,Eisenhower,Johnson,Nixon,Reagan,Clinton,BushII all had plenty of time to plan for 2nd term.

Of course so did Ford, Carter and Bush I.

There may not be enough samples to get a good p-value, but more often than not the recipe of "just don't mess up too bad" gets a another term for a sitting President.

[brown9-2]

Trounced? He only lost South Carolina by 10 points, and Georgia by only 8. Some of these states are not as deep-red as were once thought.

[raimondious]

Well he does say himself in the article that the headline is nothing more than linkbait, not to be taken seriously.

[sageikosa]

Obama's secret weapon is the Ellsworth Toohey effect :-D Basically it isn't his weapon.

[rayiner]

I think this is a great answer to people who ask why we still need things like affirmative action. Here you have a continuing demographic phenomenon that can be traced directly back to slave ownership patterns hundreds of years ago. It should be noted also that the black belt is also a terribly poor stretch of the country.

Unfortunately, it appears that socioeconomic patterns are imprinted more deeply than anyone would want, and more deeply than a lot of people would like to admit.

[UnoriginalGuy]

The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race. It is racist. In fact it isn't just based on race, it is based on skin colour - since some mixed black-white people with white skin can be discriminated against.

America needs to put race on the sidelines and start thinking in terms of class. You should help the disadvantaged or poor regardless of their great great grandparent's struggles.

Affirmative action should exist; but it should be entirely based on parental income, growing up in a poor area, or other disadvantaged indicators. Not race, not ethnicity, and not gender. These things don't prove you're poor or disadvantaged.

[javert]

How do you get from "more black people live in areas where there were more productive plantations" to "we need affirmative action"?

(The answer is, you don't.)

[shantanubala]

Although I agree with you, I get the impression that someone who doesn't think affirmative action should exist even after learning about the gang violence, intense poverty, substance abuse, neglect, and trauma that surrounds children growing up in housing projects and "bad neighborhoods" -- even after all of that, if someone still says no, then you could probably trace this back to the Big Bang and they'll still say no.

[newbie12]

Yet, today more blacks live in New York state than any other, so this pattern isn't unbreakable. The southern black belt's problems can be addressed through regional policy rather than more government racism.

[stretchwithme]

And a lot of people of Dutch descent are still farming in New York.

[astine]

That strikes me as terrible reasoning. People living in these communities (as well as others in the deep south) have generally lived in these communities for generations and will likely continue to do so even no matter how much affirmative action you enact. That slavery is the original reason that they are where they are is irrelevant because it hasn't been the reason for generations.

[bennesvig]

Affirmative action doesn't make any sense. The economist Thomas Sowell has written extensively on it.

The Other Side of Affirmative Action http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell060899.asp

The book "Black Rednecks & White Liberals" goes further into this: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell050505.asp

[clarky07]

We just had an African American man elected to his second term as president. We don't need aa anymore. Just stop discriminating. Don't put skin color on applications at all.

[andrewtbham]

I live in Birmingham AL and the existence of the black belt is common knowledge here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(U.S._region)

As a kid, I assumed it was called the black belt because of the black people, not knowing it's because the soil is black.

[pavel_lishin]

A neighboring town's motto was, "The blackest soil and the whitest people."

Despite people's assurances that "white" in this case simply means "good", I always had mixed feelings about it.

[homosaur]

OMG me too. That also explains the large black population also along that belt. I always assumed it was a mildly racist thing. Now I feel kind of silly actually...

[arethuza]

I've been fascinated with geology ever since I realised that it is really history on an epic scale (living in Edinburgh also helps) - one book that really opened my eyes to the subject is Richard Fortey's The Earth: An Intimate History:

http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Intimate-History-Richard-Fortey/...

[praptak]

There is a book that connects large-scale geology with the human-scale history by arguing how the former affects the later. It's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond.

[i386]

I found "Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet" by Ted Nield absolutely fascinating. He presented historical theory's as well as modern ones to give the reader a better idea about how drift theory came to be.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0674026594

[mjhoy]

Another great book is _Annals of the Former World_ by John McPhee (at least regarding US geology):

http://www.amazon.com/Annals-Former-World-John-McPhee/dp/037...

[rhplus]

I enjoyed "The Map That Changed The World", which is the story of how the study of geology developed during the Industrial period of England. It's the story of William Smith, one of the first people to identify strata formations in coal mines and canal trenches and use them to predict patterns elsewhere.

http://amzn.com/0061767905

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smith_(geologist)

[chiph]

In South Carolina, that line is called the Orangeburg Scarp. It is where the coastline used to be millions of years ago. Driving westward from the coast, you'll encounter a series of steep hills these days as you gain elevation.

If the Garner-Edisto fault line ever lets go in a major way, you want to be on the western side of it, to avoid the anticipated Tsunami.

[kitsune_]

This article is nothing more than blog spam. Yeah, it provides a link back to the original post, but that's about it. Even most of the images are lifted.

[mattdeboard]

"blog spam" aka packaging and reporting a story from elsewhere, a basic part of journalism. People around here really try too hard to be indignant.

[dbaupp]

The original article being: http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-ar...

[arrrg]

Nothing was lifted. The article was published on a different website with a larger audience. (That’s how people found it and posted it here, so don’t you dare question the value of republishing something.) I assume that NPR asked the author for permission to republish.

Why are HN readers trying so hard to be assholes about stuff like this?

[weinzierl]

Good catch, I'm sorry I missed the link to the original in the footer. I guess it isn't possible to change a link after it has been posted?

[jofo25]

I think its quite cool. I had no idea this blue band in the south existed. The history behind the fertile land and slavery migration I found particularly interesting.

It does make an unwritten assumption that more black people = more democrat votes. But I guess that is probably a fair assumption to make.

[xefer]

It is very interesting, but it comes up every election cycle now:

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/Research/Elec2000/GeolElec2000.HT...

[curiousdannii]

It's also at least the third submission of the article.

[Karunamon]

NPR is blog spam now!?

[wallawe]

How is this Obama's 'secret weapon'? There is an electoral college, and he lost these states by a landslide.

[username3]

The Republican Party (also called the GOP, for "Grand Old Party") is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery activists in 1854, it dominated politics nationally for most of the period from 1860 to 1932.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_States...

[brown9-2]

I would like to see the red-blue county map compared with a map of how populous those counties are.

Focusing on just the geography of which counties are which color can be very misleading when some counties have a million residents and some have thousands. The focus on county as a unit makes it easy to mistake size of county, and the resulting size of each color, as indicative of the overall vote total.

[m0skit0]

Wow, fascinating. I was about to stop reading when you said it's because of plankton... I'm glad I didn't!

[flxmglrb]

How exactly is this a "secret weapon"? Obama did not carry any of the states in this region except perhaps Florida (it's still being counted), which is not even among the states with these swatches of ancient plankton deposits.

Also, if you look at the map it's clear the blue patches are clustered around major highways and rivers, which is where the population centers will obviously be. As we've seen before, the Democratic / Republican divide is very strongly along the lines of urban vs. rural. There doesn't seem to be any mention in the article of how that factors into this. Obviously there is a bit of chicken & egg thing going on with population and highways, but you would think there could at least have been some discussion of this.

[ctingom]

Obama didn't win any of those states, so how is it a secret weapon?

[Tipzntrix]

I find it pretty funny that it sounds like the author's implying black people will vote for Obama.

Then again, he did win somewhere from 90% to 98% of their vote [1], so the assumption is based in truth somewhere.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2229225/Presidential...

[patrickgzill]

Summary: a lot of black people voted for Obama, giving him the edge in certain states.

[tzs]

Interesting how this got no attention when it was posted 9 days ago, and takes off this time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714274

[tapertaper]

This is more about slavery than plankton.

Fertile land does not equal Obama votes.

[JoeAltmaier]

Fertile land in the south did definitely correlate with Obama votes, as the article made clear.

[ekm2]

The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race

The problem with the need for affirmative action is that it was the outcrop of slavery,which was based on race.

[stretchwithme]

More supporters living in some areas doesn't change the number of supporters. So not sure how this is a secret weapon.

[debacle]

Obama's secret weapon this Tuesday was Mitt Romney.

John Huntsman, had he have won the primaries, would have won the election.

[allenwlee]

i don't know about this. this band basically traces the southern coastline. to me the simplest explanation is that coastlines (because they are richer) are largely white, so that inland populations in the south will be more black.