In July, Don Beachler’s book “Winning the White House 2004: Region by Region, Vote by Vote” was released by Palgrave Macmillan. Kevin J. McMahon, John Kenneth White and David M. Rankin were co-authors. Assistant Accent Editor Liz Taddonio sat down with Beachler to discuss the research process and the goals of his work.

Accent: How long did the book take to research, and when did you start?

Don Beachler: Well, we had to have it to the publisher by March 15, 2005. I did a lot of the data for comparative purposes starting some time in May 2004.

A: What kind of information does the book cover?

DB: It’s different than some books on the election because it breaks it down into regions. The politics of the United States is extremely regionalized now. If you look at a map, Kerry carried New England, all the states to the Potomac River, four states that touched the Great Lakes, the West coast and nothing else. And so we try to explain why and what the difference is between the regions.

A: What kind of research went into preparing the book?

DB: I used exit polls for various states. We looked at where the religiosity is more in some states than others. Gun ownership, things like that. How many people consider themselves born-again Christian, how many people own guns. Those are big categories. It used to be American politics were determined by how much income you had. That told which way you were going to vote. Democrats were the party of the working class. Now, it’s often about culture. Whether you own a gun is more predictive of how you’re going to vote than how much money you make.

A: Why was this book important for you to write?

DB: There’s always two or three books that come out after an election that tend to analyze it in various ways. They tend to do it by denomination and each candidate’s campaign. Nobody had addressed it specifically by issues or by regions. We really wanted to look at the cultural divide in American politics, and we didn’t feel that had been done in one of these quad-annular election books.