Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic.
Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland (Maine) Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.
"The borders of my 11 American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history," Woodard writes in the fall 2013 issue of Tufts University's alumni magazine.