ilx's ned raggett posted a much more illuminating map here:
http://ilx.p3r.net/thread.php?msgid=5213838
which doesn't get around the fact that the south and mountain west are firmly in gop hands, but all of this 'oh the impenetrable violent pigfucking american middle' from europeans is just about as dippy and effete as fox news says you all are. so enough.
full disclosure: i was born in wisconsin, raised between london and a little town in southern iowa. now live in minneapolis, very midwestern and very blue. except for the suburbs (haha and the statehouse...)
n e waaay, the numbers i've seen imply that this election didn't change anybody's mind abt anything. Kerry took self-described liberals 85-15, moderates 55-45, and conservatives 15-85. trouble is, those conservatives were something like 29% of voters in 2000; this time around they were like 34%. The mobilization of right-wing churces has been much discussed elsewhere.
Even this "morals" thing is a bit suspect. It read to me like some filler category tacked on by the pollsters after the "real" issues had been listed; lo and behold, it gets massive hits; really any and all of a voter's decisions are moral issues, if you're the kind of voter not discouraged from speaking about them that way. Many have explained this vote away by characterizing it as a kind of national fag-bash quite apart from the the figure of the president (the evidence does support this, to be sure), but even that is a rather masochistic comfort compared to staring into the abyss of love that so many americans feel for bush's stumblemouthed clarity.
and as long as i've brought up flagrantly partisan media... don't you ppl, brits especially, who cannot fathom bush's appeal, and who are utterly stunned by his second term, owe your own (chosen) discursive gatekeepers a strong slap across the face? surely it is their purpose to make these things plain?