Where the racists live

There were very few places that voted more heavily Republican than Democratic this year:

The darker red an area is, the more heavily it favored Republicans this cycle than in 2004.

There's a few places that can be explained away: Arizona and Alaska obviously favored their natives, Arkansas folks were probably bitter about Hillary not getting the nomination, and the Gulf Coast probably liked McCain's proposals for offshore drilling. But, excepting that, you're left with basically a map of where the racists in America live; the people who refused to vote for Obama just because he's (half-)black (or Muslim!). There's a "racist belt" running from West Virginia down Appalachia into North Texas. (Actually, this probably masks much of the racist south because black turnout was probably much higher in the rural flatlands of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.)

ETA: Apparently the NYT discovered that their cool map that I used to generate that graphic above was itself a story. They do a better job of explaining the demographics involved but stop short of calling the (literal) hillbillies the racists that they are. (The story uses the horrible euphemism "less exposed to ...diversity".)

ETA Part 2: Other people are starting to find new angles on this. Strange Maps has a really eerie overlay of 1860s cotton production vs. 2008 voting records, which helps explain why parts of the rural south didn't show up on the map above.