Maine’s Portland Press Herald also spoke with Colin Woodard to get the backstory on why Maine always ranks so high in voter participation
The New York Times recently interviewed Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard about the origins and meaning of various geographical terms in popular culture, from the Sun Belt and Rust Belt to red states, blue states and Flyover Country.
Their story, by features writer Remy Tumin, published today under the headline “Sun Belt, Rust Belt, Barbecue Belt: America’s Debatable Regions.”
“The United States is an incredibly complicated country,” Woodard said, explaining why these terms existed and why there’s always a debate about which states are and are not described by them. “The actual underlying things that people are trying to describe often don’t match the state boundaries.”
Woodard, the author of American Nations and The Lobster Coast, also spoke last week with the Portland Press Herald about why Maine (and other “Yankee” states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Vermont) always rank at the very top of U.S. states in voter participation. Their story, “Maine had the nation’s highest voter turnout in 2022. Will it happen again?” published Nov. 3.
“Today, you look at Maine and other states in (New England) and they often have home rule and very powerful municipal governments and weak counties because of the importance of democratic, immediate participation in politics,” he told the paper, Maine’s largest daily. “That’s been true since the 1600s.”
The Seattle Times also published the story, via the New York Times wire service.
Woodard’s work was also featured this week by the Minnesota Star-Tribune and the BBC’s Spanish-language service, BBC Mundo.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.