n obviously parallels that of President Clinton and the U.S. Congress.
The conservative-to-liberal political spectrum in Florida is in some ways also a roughly geographical spectrum. The most solidly "traditional" area of the state is in the Panhandle, among the families whose cultural connections are much more to the states to the north, northwest, and west of Florida than to anyone or anything in the rest of Florida. These include Scots-Irish whose families settled in the Appalachians and Ozarks during the seventeeth and eighteenth and sometimes even nineteenth centuries, and Cajun communities along the Gulf Coast whose family connections are, of course, with Louisisana. There are other ethnic pockets as well. The party affiliation in these areas was about 90 percent Democratic in the 1970s, and Republican inroads have been much smaller here than elsewhere in the state. Voting here can be conservative on some issues, liberal on others, and generally somewhat unpredicatable.
The geographic spectrum now sweeps down through the middle of the state, to the Interstate 4 corridor, which is the part of the state that is booming economically, benefiting from the national trend for businesses to relocate from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, as well as from the computer industry and all its spinoffs. Florida's population is growing fairly rapidly--Florida has one of the highest rates of population growth in the country--and most of that growth is centered along this corridor, which links the Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan
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