No more Red and Blue maps in 2008?

There was a very interesting article by Michael Barone a week ago, Throw Out the Maps in 2008, where he argued that the red and blue state maps of 2000 and 2004 were obsolete and the picture would be quite different in November.
In his reasoning he argued that,

The demographic factor most highly correlated with voting behavior in 2000 and 2004 was religion, or depth of religious belief.

But this is not exactly accurate. In studies of demographic factors comparing census data with voting results by county we find that population density, in other words if you live in an urban vs. rural or suburban community, was far more significant in explaining the geographic pattern of the vote. Next came marrieds vs. singles. Exit poll data does not capture the geographic factors, so other attributes of these different lifestyles appear significant, like guns or music preferences.

Church attendance was one significant factor the media pundits latched onto, but this was likely correlated with the two more determinant factors of urban/rural and married/single (which are also correlated). People in rural communities go to church for social as well as religious reasons. Married people with children are also more likely to attend church. To say that church-going is the primary factor of people voting red may be as inaccurate as saying urbanites vote blue because they're single and go to Starbucks on Sunday.

For religious faith there are two components that make it more likely to translate into politics. First is the ideological component between orthodoxy and modernism. We see most Christian denominations have split along those lines and this is what the evangelist movement is all about - returning to orthodoxy. But the secular world is split this way as well between traditionalists and progressives.

The second component is organizational - people who meet in a prearranged place on a regular schedule are much easier to rally to a political cause. Workers' parties discovered this a long time ago and the rising significance of church groups is a reflection of unions' decline and the rise of orthodox mega-churches.

Anyway, nothing has changed much in our national politics that would predict big changes in the geographic distribution of partisan support. The best we can say is that McCain may appeal to many urban Democrats who formerly voted blue. Both Obama and Clinton represent the left liberal governing philosophy shared by Al Gore and John Kerry.

A better interpretation of our situation was offered by Michael Medved a few days later in his article, Our 50-50 political world. Medved recognizes that the US electorate has been residing on a knife-edge split between alternative ideologies for a long time. The party platforms that developed over the past two generations have lined these ideologies up with geography by appealing to different locational constituencies. In other words Republicans have appealed directly to married ruralites and suburbanites while Democrats have appealed directly to single urbanites. While McCain is a slight twist for Republicans and Obama represents a stylistic change for Democrats, reds and blues are sticking to their guns on most substantive policy issues.

Even if they don't know it.