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A while ago, I compared a map of the 2008 Democratic primary outcomes (including the likely outcomes for states that haven't voted yet) with the map of linguistic regions in David Hackett Fischer's book - and thought the parallels were striking. So this article is a nice affirmation for my own personal amateur hypotheses.
But by equating Barack Obama's support with Greater New England, I think you're overlooking something: Those parts of the west where neither New England/Nordic nor Southern/Mexican settlers predominated.
Insofar as Obama belongs to any regional American culture, he belongs to his mother's Kansas - in other words, to a state settled by Methodists from the Mid-Atlantic States. And Obama's success in predominately white states extends beyond Greater New England to the central Great Plain and Rocky Mountain states.
Political parties based in Greater New England tend to be minority parties - fine. But political parties based in Greater New England AND the (north) west? (i.e. Essentially that combination made the Republican Party the majority party from the end of the Civil War until the New Deal.) Allowing that Barack Obama can't compete with John McCain in the South and might have trouble competing with him among urban blue collar white people, is it impossible to imagine him succeeding in those western "red states" where McCain was crushed not only Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, but even (in Montana and Nevada) by Ron Paul?
A Democratic Party that constantly relies on candidates from the South to snatch one or two swing states from the Republicans doesn't look like something that could ever attain the status of a real majority party. And a strategy that requires the Democratic Party to nominate candidates from one particular regional culture is unfair to everybody else in the country. (Anyway, as the quasi-Southern Al Gore showed, nominating Southerners isn't even a guarantee of success.) Maybe it's better to take a risk on broadly redrawing the geographical/political lines of the United States, instead of simply making 2008 the eleventh round of "Woo the South".
