Missouri put a question on the ballot this week, and the answer it got back is worth a closer look, because it says something we keep forgetting about ourselves.
Here’s the setup. Missouri is not a swing state anymore. Trump carried it by eighteen points. Republicans run the legislature, they wrote this measure, and they scheduled the vote for a sleepy August primary, which is about as friendly a field as they could have picked. The measure would have made it a lot harder for ordinary citizens to change the state constitution, which is the tool Missourians have used over the years to do things the legislature wouldn’t.
It lost. Not by a little. It lost big! Nearly four to one. Almost 80% of Missouri said no.
Do the math on that, because it’s the whole point. You cannot get to 80% “no” in a state that red without an enormous number of people who vote Republican marking the exact same box as the bluest precincts in St. Louis. The reddest corners of rural Missouri and the heart of a Democratic city looked at the same question and gave the same answer, and gave it hard. Even the campaign against it wasn’t one-sided. It was a coalition of groups from the left and the right, which is something you almost never see these days.
Two places that look, on a map, like they agree on absolutely nothing. Agreeing that much on one thing.
That’s the part the map never shows you. We color a state red or a county blue, and then we believe the color all the way down, as if every person inside it thinks one way. But the color is a trick. It goes to whoever won, and it takes the whole county with it, no matter how close the vote was. A place that split 51/49 gets painted the exact same red as a place that went 90/10. Same color, and it swallows every single person who voted the other way. There are a lot of those people. There are more of them than the map will ever show.
Now let me bring it home, because we had our own version of this the same week, and it didn’t make a fraction of the noise.
An enormous data center, roughly three billion dollars, is going up in Spartanburg County. A lot of folks who live right next to it felt like something that big got waved through without the kind of public hearing a thing that big ought to get. So they did something people almost never do. Dozens of them chartered a coach bus and rode over an hour down to Columbia, on a weekday, for a hearing in front of the Public Service Commission. They packed the room. It was the biggest turnout that commission had seen since 2018.
Nobody took a poll on that bus. But look at the county it rolled out of. Spartanburg went for Trump two to one in 2024, the kind of county that shows up solid red on every map anybody ever draws of this state. And more than fifty thousand people there voted for Harris. Fifty thousand, in that one county, painted over by the color.
So I can’t tell you who sat in which seat. But a busload of neighbors out of a county like that almost certainly had both kinds on it, riding three seats apart to the same hearing, for the same reason. They didn’t get on as Republicans and Democrats. They got on as people who live next to the same construction site and didn’t think anybody had listened to them.
That’s the thing I wish a map could show, and it never will. You have a whole lot more in common with the folks down the road, even the ones whose yard signs make you wince, than a red or blue square will ever admit. Most of the time you just never find out. The question that would prove it doesn’t get asked, and the bus doesn’t get chartered, and everybody drives home alone, still assuming.
Missouri got asked, and answered. A busload of South Carolinians climbed on without being asked at all.
There are more of us who agree than the map has ever let us see.