12 years later, the problem has compounded… exponentially.
From 2004 with relevancy for today:
The red states may have won an election. But the blue states won the culture war.
If we couldn’t trust the exit polls to determine who would win the U.S. presidential election, why should we believe its post-election analysis? On Election Day, exit polls had liberal journalists in newsrooms all over the world positively giddy. Senator Kerry was projected to win easily. After he lost, the downcast media elite at least took comfort in the fact that, according to exit polls, it was the right-wing, homophobic Christians in the heartland of America that tilted the scales in favor of the incumbent.
Suddenly, America was ultra-religious—a “conservative” nation. It scared thousands of paranoid liberals enough to even consider the prospect of immigrating to Canada. Bloggers circulated maps of North America around the Internet with the West Coast and the Northeast shaded blue, along with Canada—collectively calling it “The United States of Canada.” Middle America, in red, was labeled “Jesusland.” New Yorkers and San Franciscans took offense at Middle America’s self-righteous disdain for the lifestyle and culture promoted on both coasts. The New York Times quoted one New Yorker as saying, “I’m saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country—the heartland. This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country—in the heartland.”
Global Geopolitics 