A few more items regarding the election
Are you tired of hearing about the election? Not quite yet, we hope…
The Decatur (Ala.) Daily reported Monday about the hot market that’s developed for Barack Obama campaign collectibles.
The Daily’s Paul Huggins reports:
Vickie Gibbons didn’t have to worry about retrieving President-elect Barack Obama political signs the day after the election.
The secretary for the Morgan County Democratic Party knew collectors would seize every sign available.
“If fact, we held 150 signs in reserve to put out at polling places and places of prominence, and we waited till the night before (the election) to put them out because we knew collectors would grab them up,” she said.
Scroll all the way to the bottom to read about Obama campaign buttons and why some are worth a lot more to collectors than others.
The Daily posted the story Monday but it’s available only to subscribers. Luckily, you can read it at Trading Markets. Which is a lesson itself in why not to block stories online.
Meanwhile, our pal Dennis Bolt found this fascinating map over at one of our favorite blogs, StrangeMaps.
The StrangeMaps blogger — who prefers to remain anonymous — overlaid a county-by-county map showing election results onto a vintage map showing cotton production in 1860:
Each black dot represents 2,000 bales of cotton produced in 1860, the year before the Civil War began. And the blue counties are the ones that voted for Obama. The red counties, of course, voted for McCain.
Only three of the states shown here — Virginia, North Carolina and Florida — were won by Obama two weeks ago. And we already know that African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Obama.
What this map suggests is that many blacks really haven’t strayed very far from where their ancestors labored on cotton farms as slaves, nearly 150 years ago.
Fascinating stuff. Thanks, Dennis, for pointing us to it.
Find the StrangeMaps blog here. Read a Q&A we published last year with the StrangeMaps blogger here.
By the way, Dennis points out that this week — Nov. 16-22 — is Geography Awareness Week. The Chicago Tribune published its annual GeoQuiz Sunday.