I’ve seen a lot of red state folks, lately, talking about how maybe it’s time to simply let the blue states go their own way.
I disagree. I don’t see any call for that at all. Here is the current House of Representatives electoral map as posted at Real Clear Politics, right now (1053, 11/11/2020):
Most of the land mass is red. Doesn’t mean most of the population is, but if you cut out those blue areas and let them become their own country (or probably “countries”), where do they get their food? Where is their industry? How do the interior blue areas get goods shipped to them? (By air? Too expensive in the long run.)
Not even California is fully blue. Most of the area away from the coast is red. And that’s where most of the food comes from. Not to mention the water.
And look at most of the two land borders. Mostly red.
There’s a map Brad Torgeson (the science fiction writer) likes to point out regarding the 2016 election. He calls it the “Clinton Archipelago.” I believe it’s based on the county-level returns, not for the House of Representatives, but no matter:
I say “no matter”, because it looks pretty much the same, doesn’t it?
Then there’s TrumpLand (again, based on 2016 numbers), with all the food, industry, and resources, and no areas cut off from other areas:
So, really, you’re talking about something that’s pretty impractical when you talk about dividing up the country between the blues and the reds.
Like it or not, we’re all Americans, and we’re going to have to (re-)learn how to live together — even if that means a bunch of people are going to have to suddenly find out what a civil war is really like. I mean, I live in a blue city with a blue wife, but if the blue cities suddenly get cut off, we’re not so far from a red county that we couldn’t quickly relocate. And we would.
But I don’t want to live in Friday’s world. And neither should you.