Representative Greene, you should be very careful what you wish for. I know you blurted out (again) that red states should separate from blue states.
You need to study your own state. It’s neither red, nor blue. It’s a purple state.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I want to lead you to an article written by Rex Huppke in a USA post: Marjorie Taylor Greene wants a ‘national divorce.’ This liberal says: ‘Let’s do it!’.
Divorce MTG Style
If you don’t have time to do that, here is what Rep. Greene has suggested.
- We need a national divorce.
- Red states will separate from blue states. I’m not sure how, but I’m sure she does. Or has she read anything about the Civil war? Perhaps she doesn’t know that “her” state separated from the Union in 1960.
- This will eliminate the United States and create a red country and a blue country.
- We’ll eliminate the departments like the Department of Education. I think she needs to come to Atlanta and drop in on the Georgia Department of Education and ask if they would support her idea of eliminating them.
- She would ban a lot of books, threaten teachers with jail time if they read from “Charlotte’s Web,” “Charlies and the Chocolate Factory,” or “The Bluest Eye.”
A Retirement was a Gift to Green and Loss to us
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a House member from Georgia District 14. You see it in the upper left corner of the map. Although I don’t live in her district, part of her district intrudes into the county where I live, and the rest of her district is a short drive north on I-75 from Marietta, GA. She didn’t live in this district when she ran for the seat when the incumbent, Tom Graves retired in 2020. She actually was going to run for representative in Georgia’s 7th congressional district. Then she decided to run in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, where she had lived for a long time, in the city of Milton. She moved into the 14th after the 2020 election. She probably would have lost in Republican primaries for either district. The 14th district seat was gift to Greene, and a loss for Georgia and the country.
Fossils in Green’s District
Green’s district is really a very beautiful part of the state. I’ve spent a lot of time in her district, not campaigning for her but to take children, their parents, as well as undergraduate and graduate students from Georgia State University fossil hunting. I started doing this in 1970.
I know lots of teachers, as well their students in middle and high schools in her district. They all traveled to Russia as participants in the Global Thinking Project student and teacher exchange program in the 1990s. And indeed, the students, and their parents hosted Russian kids in their homes for three weeks periods at this time.
Georgia is not a Red State
Rep. Greene probably wouldn’t read a research article, whether it came from authors in a red state or a blue state. I found an article, however, that her constituents might want to read. It’s an article that shows why using the red/blue dichotomy of states is misleading and confuses the actual effect of voting. Greene should think about the implications for her future, given the research shown here.
You need to realize that the media loves to use dichotomies. The red/blue dichotomy of states fits perfectly with the media’s desire to show each side (hint: 2 sides) to an issue. Here’s what the authors, Rémy A. Furrer, Karen Schloss, Gary Lupyan, Paula M. Niedenthal & Adrienne Wood say about using political maps of election results:
The media uses electoral maps to visualize the results of political elections. In the United States, red represents the Republican party and blue represents the Democratic party in a winner-takes-all election. This dichotomization provides a simple visual representation of election outcomes, but it conceals the margin of votes by which an election is won/lost.
Furrer, R.A., Schloss, K., Lupyan, G. et al. Red and blue states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence. Cogn. Research 8, 11 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00465-2 Licensed under open access CC Attribution, 4.0 International License.
Red, Blue and Purple
Since the 2020 election, Georgia voters have elected democrats (presumably blue candidates) in national elections for two senate seats and the presidency. From a national point of view, Georgia shifted from two Republican senators to two Democrats, and chose a democratic candidate for president for the first time since Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
The media prefer to depict the country into red and blue states. According to Furrer, et.al, depicting the U.S. using a dichotomous color mapping simplifies complex voting patterns but it can also alter the ways in which people construe partisan politics, potentially further polarizing people’s estimates of voting outcomes.
The map shown as A, is a dichotomous solution to presenting election outcomes. The counties where Donald Trump received the most votes are colored red and the counties where Hillary Clinton received the most votes are colored blue.
The map shown as B is a continuous hue solution to mapping election results. Counties are shaded according to winning candidate’s percentage of the vote, with purple counties being closer races and redder or bluer counties having a larger margin in favor of Trump or Clinton, respectively. The overall map tends toward purple.
Travel Plans
Marjorie Taylor Green might want to reconsider her idea of splitting the country into red and blue states. Where would she go? Kansas?
Patricia Murphy, AJC senior journalist, posted an article about MTG. Here are some quotes from her article (https://www.ajc.com/politics/opinion-marjorie-taylor-greene-completes-her-divorce-from-reality/IJP3SZJUDVC7HANEFON66L7NO4/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_6266849).
“In a series of posts to Twitter, Greene sketched out how she thought secession should work. She then quickly showed up on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to expound on the idea of breaking the country apart. And Hannity quickly picked the idea up and ran with it.”
“I don’t see middle ground on a lot of these issues,” he said, citing topics like national defense and climate change. “So what is the other answer if it’s not a divorce?”
“Well exactly,” she responded, before insisting that the civil war she’d called for is not really a civil war.”
“Greene called America “a crumbling nation” and “a nation in distress.” She described her version of America as some kind of a reverse-racist hellscape, where white people are victimized, conservative members of Congress are silenced, and corporations are being taken over by the federal government.
The only way out, she concluded, is apart.”
Patricia Murphy’s article continued. It’s hard to tell if Greene believes the nonsense she’s spouting or just saying it all to get a national reaction and the online campaign donations that flow from there.
But it really doesn’t matter. Thanks to her alliance with Speaker McCarthy, Greene is no longer just a sideshow for Republicans. She’s the main act in town, with real power and a platform to amplify it. And that’s a reality none of us can divorce.