ABSTRACT

This chapter continues with a brief discussion of the 12 statewide votes examined, and is followed by a section detailing how we quantitatively defined Alabama's place-based electoral geographies. It examines six statewide referenda and six statewide partisan elections in Alabama during the past dozen years. We hypothesize these spatial cleavages are the durable underlying electoral geographies associated with the varied contexts of recent statewide elections in Alabama. These two statewide votes were the only contests in which both north Alabama and the Wiregrass returned strong support for the same issue or candidate. Thus the durability of the Black Belt coupled with the shifting importance of the Wiregrass and north Alabama in the statewide votes contributed to the high level of concurrent similarity and difference identified in the factor analysis. These places included a major urban locale, the Black Belt, the Wiregrass, counties with concentrations of creative class employment, and the counties in the northern third of Alabama.