http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/

The link attached here contains some fascinating election data from every presidential election going back to 1789, when the Father of Our Country, aka George Washington, was elected as the country’s first president.

When you drill down into the 2012 election results, you are struck by at least one curious aspect: Republican nominee Mitt Romney won much more real estate across the electoral map than President Barack Obama. I haven’t calculated the difference, but when you click on the state maps you see that Romney won many more counties in the vast majority of states than the president. Romney won every county in several states, such as Oklahoma and Utah, while Obama ran the table in places such as Massachusetts and Hawaii.

The same thing was true in 2008, when Obama defeated Sen. John McCain by an even greater margin than he beat Romney. In fact, that’s been the tendency in many recent elections, with Democrats scoring well in the densely populated urban areas while Republicans do better where the population is more spread out. Take the Texas Panhandle, for example, where it is said that in some counties cattle outnumber human beings.

Some of sour-grape swallowers out there among the GOP ranks like to suggest that Obama’s two victories don’t really count partly because of that phenomenon. They like to declare some sort of moral victory by explaining that the losing candidate actually did better than the results indicate because he/she won more real estate than the individual who actually won … by getting more votes than the loser.

My answer is this: People, not livestock, elect politicians.

Get over it.