ABSTRACT
An important critique one could make against Bishop and Cushing's (2008) argument that the electorate is geographically sorting along partisan lines is that they relied on a relatively crude geographic unit: counties. When examining the geographic distribution of counties that gave consistent landslide victories to one party or the other in recent elections, we see that a huge increase in the number of overwhelmingly Republican counties can be found in the sparsely populated rural counties in the center of the country. From these maps, one who knew nothing about the distribution of the U.S. population might incorrectly infer that the Republican Party is the dominant political power in the United States.
