The sharperning red-blue divide

It is not only across the country, but within states as well.

A couple of years ago, Bill Bishop argued in his book, The Big Sort, that Americans seem to choose where to live based on their political beliefs.  (I would think that my own small neighborhood does not represent Bishop's view--we have everybody from the Tea Partiers to the peace-loving left.  Bishop's point does seem to be valid at larger geographic units.)  This election underscores that geographic clustering within states:
Exhibit 1, which is a letter in the local newspaper, on the election of the Democrat John Kitzhaber as governor:

Probably comes across as sour grapes, but Gov.-elect John Kitzhaber was not elected by the state of Oregon. He was elected by two ultraliberal counties, Lane and Multnomah. Lane, with the University of Oregon and The Register-Guard, and Multnomah County combined for 67.9 percent for Kitzhaber and 32.1 percent for Dudley. The other 34 counties voted 43.6 percent for Kitzhaber and 56.4 percent for Dudley. Doesn’t exactly come across as equal representation. Of the 36 counties, only seven voted in favor of Kitzhaber, and 29 counties were a sea of red for Dudley.

Exhibit 2, which is a short essay in the New York Review of Books, on the re-election of the Democrat Patty Murray as Washington's senator:

Democrats inhabit the low shores of Puget Sound, mostly on its eastern side, in a ragged trail of port-cities that stretches from Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia, the state capital, at the southern end of the sound. In Seattle, our very liberal Democrat congressman, Jim McDermott, is being returned to D.C. for his twelfth term with a majority (so far) of 82 percent of the vote, which is a tad down from his 2008 figure. In fact, most of western Washington’s Democratic candidates for the House (four successful, one unsuccessful, and one yet to be decided) defended the administration’s record in their campaigns. But when you drive eastward over the Interstate 90 bridge that crosses the long and skinny Lake Washington, to Bellevue and beyond, you enter Republican territory, whose redness steadily deepens over the next three hundred miles to the Idaho border.
The north-south line of “the mountains,” meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier. On November 2, all twenty counties east of the mountains voted for Dino Rossi, while Patty Murray’s support was concentrated in the urban settlements on Puget Sound.

Update: This letter in the newspaper from the state's capital reflects the view expressed in Exhibit 1:

As long as the "states" of Portland and Eugene have their say, there will be no such thing as a two-party state. They dictate what goes and what doesn't.