Joe Biden: polls of approval and favorability

[pbrower2a]

Here is one map depicting how early English, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish settlement created political cultures in America. I don't fully agree with it, but in general the institutions largely fit even if the ethnic mix  is very different from the original settlers. The Spanish settled much of the southern tier of what would eventually be part of the United States. The first European settlers established the political institutions, economic patterns,  and educational practices in place to this day. Later immigrants may have kept their religious beliefs and surnames, but they accommodated what was available. Thus later mass settlement, as by the Irish, might take over institutions as populations shifted, but they did not transform those institutions.

Trump did badly in Yankee-Land, even doing worse than average for Republicans since 1952 in Utah -- twice. Mormons are reactionaries on economics, but also hostile to flamboyant hedonism of the sort that Trump exemplifies in his personal life. He also did horrendously in the Tidewater region, losing Virginia by 10% and almost losing North Carolina.  The Left Coast? He got slaughtered there politically. New Spain? Trump lost California , which is mostly New Spain (and I could make the case that "New Spain" has 'taken back' the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento) but also Arizona. Trump did unusually badly in Texas for a Republican, and that bodes ill for the GOP unless Republicans can reverse or suppress the trend of an increasingly-large Mexican-American electorate. 

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American regional differences (except in greater New York City, southern Louisiana, far-south Florida, and "New Spain") reflect to no small extent the folkways of the parts of Britain whence the early settlers came:

  

Gaelic Scots largely went to Canada. The Catholics from what is now the Republic of Ireland did not start appearing in large numbers in North America until the early-middle part of the nineteenth century, and those found institutions already in place. It is not surprising that they assimilated heavily into the almost-exclusively Catholic Cajun/Creole population of South Florida and the Spanish-Mexican populations of New Spain.

What about the Dutch? The people of southeastern England had extensive ties to the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and northwestern Germany. London was part of the Hanseatic trading area. People of New England stock could assimilate people who weren't particularly Dutch.

The cultural divide decided the Civil War. Appalachian counties of Virginia seceded from Virginia to form West Virginia in 1863. In the referendum on secession in Tennessee between the Union and the Confederacy, eastern Tennessee voted heavily for the Union and western Tennessee voted heavily for the Confederacy to defend the slave-owning way of life. Ordinarily, large Armies do everything possible to avoid mountain campaigns due to the difficulties of transportation that normally make such areas easy to defend -- unless the people of those mountain areas are sympathetic to one's cause. The Union Army made the most of the hostility of Appalachia to slave-owning planters who saw the Mountain Folk largely as cannon fodder in the defense of slavery. It wasn't that the peoples of Appalachia had any sympathy for slaves; these people had little use for anything exotic. They hated the slave-owning planters for bringing black slaves into the eastern Tennessee Valley. Once the Union Army fully took over eastern Tennessee it could deliver the death-blow to the Confederacy with General William Tecumseh Sherman's thrust through Atlanta to the Atlantic Ocean, separating the middle part of the Confederacy from the northeast  (Virginia and the Carolinas).     

... in recent elections, Republicans have had a firm hold on Appalachia, "New France", and the Deep South. and have made gains in the Midlands (notably Iowa)... only to lose badly in  "Yankee Land", "New Spain" and the Tidewater region. This holds for Trump. He lost Georgia in 2020 because of Greater Atlanta, which votes more like Greater Chicago than like any other part of Georgia.   

The GOP is in deep trouble if one of two things happens. One is that Greater Appalachia reverts to its pre-2000 pattern (probably unlikely) or white people in the Deep South split their vote more like 60-40 R from about 75-25 R  Such would be the death-blow to the GOP machine in Texas. Either way  the GOP would lose a Presidential election in a landslide in a way not seen since :BJ trounced Goldwater.

Maps from here, and then some. This site has plenty of relevant reading.