Carpetbagger Corsi wrong about Massachusetts voters

WorldNetDaily.com columnist and co-author of the book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (Regnery, 2004) Jerome R. Corsi, who has announced his intention to move to Massachusetts as the first step in a planned 2008 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Kerry, claimed in his January 27 column that the electoral map of Massachusetts shows that “the Bay State may well be ripe for a strong conservative challenge.” Corsi wrote: “Get out the map of Massachusetts and look at how much red there is. Take Boston out of the equation and the state has real possibilities even now for inclusion in the Red State [Republican] category.” However, maps of Massachusetts that depict voter preference by locality refute Corsi's assertions.

A county-by-county map of Massachusetts displaying the results from the 2004 presidential election shows that every county in the state voted for Kerry. Rhode Island and Hawaii are the only two other states in which every county voted for Kerry, and Kerry received a higher percentage of the vote (62 percent) in Massachusetts than in any other state. But as Media Matters has noted, a county-by-county map of the U.S. created by Princeton University professor Robert J. Vanderbei more accurately depicts voter preference in the 2004 election. Rather than simply representing a county's voter preference with red (Republican) or blue (Democrat), Vanderbei's map takes into account the percentage of the Democratic and Republican vote in each county, using shades of purple to represent closely contested counties. Vanderbei's map showed that the counties of Massachusetts ranged from deep blue to purple, with a complete absence of red.

In Kerry's most recent reelection to the U.S. Senate in 2002, he received 81 percent of the statewide vote, winning not only every county but every township within those counties as well (New England states report local voting by township).