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Author discusses recent shift in electoral map

Acclaimed and controversial theorist of Southern California social dynamics, Mike Davis, spoke about recent shifts in the electoral map in front of a full audience in Lecture Hall 150 on Monday.

The author of socio-political works “City of Quartz” and “Ecology of Fear,” Davis has a reputation in the academic world as a socialist extremist with a hyperbolic writing style.

Davis has written on economic, social, environmental and political injustices in the global landscape and is currently teaching creative writing at UC Riverside.

He kept his presentation “The Impact of Obama’s Election on the American Political Scene” low-key, while analyzing factors that got the Obama campaign to the White House in 2008.

He focused on the breakup of the traditional Republican electorate, which seemed to flip in Obama’s favor last November.

Davis opened the conversation with a look at Obama’s final campaign stop in Manassas, Va., located in a county that is the epitome of what Davis calls the “greedy sprawl” of the Bush years.

“Obama in effect signaled the start of a new era,” Davis said about Obama’s victory of the traditionally Republican county. “A black Muslim with an African name had effectively defeated the ghost of Robert E. Lee.”

Davis went on to examine the victory’s implications for the Republican Party and for the American demographic makeup.

Davis’ description of an urbanizing and dynamically changing American landscape reflected the empowerment of a younger and more racially diverse electorate that flexed its power in the national election. He said Democrats took the opportunity to seize this base, while Republicans’ meager improvements only amounted to Cajun parishes in Louisiana and the parts of the upland South.

“In the upland South, race or fundamentalism or, I don’t know, posters of Sarah Palin, decisively decided the outcome,” Davis said.

Daivs said “Millennial Generation” voters — those between 18 and 29 years of age — who were “weaned on the web, comfortable with diversity, but pissed off over declining economic opportunity,” were Obama’s biggest push to victory.

The event was sponsored by Cal State Long Beach’s Geography Department.

A number of faculty members from the geography department were present, including associate professor Bipasha Baruah.

“I’ve always liked Mike Davis’ work because of how rich and immaculate his writing is,” Baruah said. “And he speaks directly to the statistics.”

“I thought it was a good synthesis of geography and history,” said Abe Leal, a geography major who attended the presentation. “Not just in terms of what happened recently, but by giving the background maps that showed that spatial distribution. The geography explains itself.”

On Wednesday, President Obama will travel to the geographically Republican island of Orange County as well as Los Angeles County for the first time since he became president. Air Force One will land at the Long Beach Airport before Obama heads to Costa Mesa and Pomona for community meetings, and then to Burbank for the filming of a “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” segment.

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