If you look at election maps of the United States and Pennsylvania - you know, those red and blue patchworks that tell you which party took which "neighborhood" - they aren't that dissimilar.
Just as the national map is a sea of red (Republican) with splashes of blue (Democratic), so too is the post-mortem map of Pennsylvania.
The casual observer might ask how in the world could Mitt Romney lose Pennsylvania - or for that matter, the national vote - with all that red showing? And, in the case of Pennsylvania, all of the state-wide races were won by Democrats as well.
It's really very simple: There are more people (voters) concentrated in the urban and suburban areas of southeast Pennsylvania than in the rest of the state, with the exception of Erie and Allegheny counties.
The dichotomy of Pennsylvania party politics should be no surprise to us in Warren County, where the three Republican General Assembly candidates had no opposition.
Does this mean that it will be nearly impossible for a Republican to be elected in southeast Pennsylvania or a Democrat in central or north-central Pennsylvania? No, but it is more difficult in both cases.
With the political entrenchment, however, comes the difficulty of getting the faithful to the polls.
One reason, other than simple registration advantage, that Mr. Romney was disappointed here in the Keystone State as well as the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, state Attorney General, Auditor and Treasurer is that the voter turnout in Philadelphia was significantly higher than it was here.
While Warren County barely broke 60 percent turnout - actually fairly high for us - the turnout in Philadelphia was about 70 percent.
Of course, all of this discussion is simply statistical second-guessing. We don't mean to infer that any single vote from any specific region is any more important than another. Just because Warren County is red and Philadelphia is blue doesn't demean the voting in either region.
In America, not only does every vote count, but every vote is inherently equal, except of course, in those rare instances when a national candidate wins the popular vote and loses the electoral vote.
But that didn't happen this time.