What the Election Maps Don’t Show - the View from Maine by Dr. Dora Anne Mills

 

What the Election Maps Don’t Show

The View from Maine
by Dr. Dora Anne Mills

November 4, 2026

What the Election Maps Don’t Show


Two things are true today.


The first is that a blue tidal wave, a “Bluenami,” as some are calling it, swept the country last night. Swings this large tell us something about a restless, unsettled country.


The second is quieter, and you have to look at a map to see it. Maine’s map looks much as it has for a decade. The rural rim - The County (Aroostook - the northernmost), western mountains, Down East, the vast interior - voted heavily Republican, while the more urban and southern parts of the state voted heavily Democratic. Similar rural-urban patterns can be seen in other states.


I believe these wild swings and regional sorting stem in part from a similar root: more and more of us live, work, and scroll among people who nod in agreement, and rarely cross paths with anyone who doesn’t.

The political scientist Robert Putnam has spent a career on this. In Bowling Alone, he described two kinds of social capital. Bonding capital connects people who are already alike, e.g., around church suppers, hunting camps, and private group chats. Bridging capital does the harder work of linking us across divides, whether at an annual town meeting or on a Portland soccer pitch where immigrants, refugees, and lifelong Mainers share the same patch of grass. Bonding, Putnam wrote, is sociological superglue. Bridging is sociological WD-40. We have no shortage of superglue these days. We are running low on WD-40.


As a physician, I don’t read this only as a civics problem. A country that only bonds and never bridges is not, by any clinical definition, a healthy one.


I say this as someone who has drawn her share of lines in the sand. Public health does that, and sometimes it must. Some of those lines I would draw again. A few, with hindsight, I would draw with a lighter hand. But my field is relearning an older lesson right now in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, epicenter of the nation’s worst measles outbreak in 35 years, since the one I lived through as a young pediatric physician in Los Angeles. There have been more than 1,300 cases and six deaths in Pennsylvania this year alone.

The state’s health department set aside the usual playbook, e.g., the press conferences, billboards, and social media that Amish families would never see. Instead, nurses asked Amish elders what their communities needed, and listened. They are bringing vaccine to kitchens, barns, garages, and volunteer fire halls, in the evening after chores. The clinics are not advertised, only passed along by word of mouth, the “Amish internet,” as it’s known. Every question gets an answer, no matter how many times it had been asked before. Nobody pushes. One Old Order Mennonite leader’s advice was simple: encourage, don’t push, and understand that trust is measured in years, not news cycles. The result is that more than 200 clinics have been held, and more than 6,000 people have been vaccinated.


Nobody is compromising on the science. They are compromising on everything else, e.g., the place, the hour, the pace, the tone. I learned this vaccinating children against measles in an inner-city McDonald’s in Los Angeles. At the time, I winced at partnering with a fast-food chain. But that’s where the families at highest risk felt safest. Meeting people where they are is not a slogan. It is a method, and it works in red towns and blue ones alike.


So here is my pledge for the morning after, and an invitation to join me.


Let’s reach across. Let’s join something that puts us in a room with people who did not vote the way we did, e.g., a grange supper, a town committee, a pickup game. Those of us in the blue can drive to the rim; those on the rim can come to the city. But we needn’t go that far. Every community has its blue streets and its red roads. Let’s listen more than we talk. Bridging is a muscle; it only grows when it is used.


Let’s choose compassion in what we say. Too much of our rhetoric is hateful, and it is making us sick, literally. Seventy-six years ago, a Republican senator from Skowhegan warned her own party against riding to victory on “the Four Horsemen of Calumny - Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.” Margaret Chase Smith’s words apply to every party, and to every one of us with a keyboard and a voice. We can be unambiguous without being unkind. Conviction and contempt are not the same thing.


Let’s treat compromise as a virtue, not a vice. Some of Maine’s greatest gifts to the country have been compromises. Ed Muskie’s Clean Air Act passed the Senate 73 to 0. The Good Friday Agreement that George Mitchell brokered has held because every side gave up something it had sworn never to give up. Yes, there are a few true lines in the sand - the dignity of every human being, the truth of the evidence, a child’s right not to die of a preventable disease. But precisely because the real lines are so few, most of what we fight over isn’t one. It is the ordinary stuff of governing: how much, how fast, who pays, which approach. So the next time a policymaker we support gives ground to get something done, that isn’t betrayal. That’s the job, and it deserves our continued support. 80% with us, should not equate to 100% opposition.


The maps will be red and blue again in two years. What they will never show is the bridges: the nurse in an Amish kitchen, the logger and the lawyer at the same bean supper, the neighbor who disagrees with you and shows up with a casserole anyway. That is where a healthy society lives, in the connective tissue the maps leave out.


We have more in common than not.


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