How to drive across U.S. without leaving MAGA Country

No map can tell us more about contemporary America than a county-by-county breakdown of how people voted in the 2024 presidential election.

Let’s say you were a Harris-Walz fan in California, and you wanted to forget your troubles by taking a drive across country. Bad idea.

A red wall runs down the middle of the state and blocks even an exit into Oregon. A loyal Democrat couldn’t drive 100 miles east without seeing a Latino field hand in a MAGA hat or a “F*** Joe Biden” sign painted on the side of a barn.

For the MAGA people in California, however, America is all yours. The state offers two points of exit, Orange County in the south and Del Norte County in the north.

The former requires some ducking and dodging through New Mexico. The latter offers very nearly a straight shot across the country.

MAGA pilgrims leaving Crescent City on the northern California coast could drive about 700 miles to Oasis, Nevada – most of it on I-80 – without even thinking about the nature of their journey.

At Oasis, the pilgrims face their first obstacle, metro Salt Lake City. A prolific champion of making babies, Brigham Young would be gobsmacked to learn that his city fell for a “reproductive rights” party openly hostile to reproducing.

To circumvent Salt Lake, our pilgrims head north to Ogden and on to Snowville and from there a straight 800 mile shot to Grand Island, Nebraska. A good audio book helps on this stretch.

At Grand Island, our pilgrims pause and reflect on the first of a class of obstacles they will face on their journey to the East Coast, the university town, in this case, Lincoln, Nebraska.

They plot a route around Lincoln and the equally fallen Omaha that involves a lot of “blue highways,” almost all now safely red. Our pilgrims end up a verdant 500 miles later in Hannibal, Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi.

Hannibal, of course, is the hometown of Mark Twain, the great American author whose books public school teachers will not let your kids read – a good reminder to take them out of public schools.

I grew fond of Hannibal during the COVID summer of 2020. The town businesses posted “mask optional” signs and few chose to wear them, including the waitresses at the Becky Thatcher diner, which I heartily recommend.

In Hannibal, our pilgrims come to an alarming recognition. They are about to cross into Illinois, the first blue (aka tax-and-spend) state since California. So they gas up and buy some cigarettes. Prices on both will only get higher going east.

Central Illinois is safely red as is Sangamon County, whose county seat, Springfield – 100 miles due east of Hannibal – has a special place in the heart of all MAGA pilgrims. A brief stop at the Lincoln sites is nearly mandatory.

From Springfield our pilgrims set their sites on Tippecanoe County, Indiana, the site of a once famous battle and possibly America’s one university-dominated county to vote MAGA. Purdue’s alums include Neal Armstrong, “Sully” Sullenberger and Jack Cashill.

To get to Purdue, our pilgrims have to detour around Champaign County, home to the University Of Illinois, whose denizens voted much more predictably. The detour adds a few miles, but not many.

From Purdue, it is a safe, straight 5-hour, 325-mile shot via Hoosier Heartland Highway and US-30 E to Canton, Ohio, the home of Republican President William McKinley, assassinated by an anarchist in 1901.

Needing to circumvent Akron, Cleveland and Pittsburgh – and with assassination on their minds – our pilgrims set their GPS for Butler, Pennsylvania.

Two hours and 90 minutes from Canton, Butler is an essential stop on any MAGA pilgrimage. Here, our pilgrims wonder why, in this age of instant information, we know more about McKinley killer Leon Czolgosz than we do about Thomas Crooks.

Again steering clear of metro Pittsburgh, our pilgrims hop on US-30 E for a 90-mile drive to Shanksville, PA, the site of the memorial to the intrepid passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 and a worthy stop.

From Shanksville, it is smooth sailing 115 miles east to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the well preserved site of the historic battle, a battlefield worthy of at least a day of any American’s time.

At Gettysburg, our pilgrims take time to plot the rest of their route. They had hoped to end up at the MAGA-friendly Jersey Shore – in Ocean County, New Jersey, Trump got 67% of the vote – but find their way blocked by a blue wall stretching the diagonal length of the state.

From Gettysburg getting to the ocean will be tricky. All but smelling the salt air, our pilgrims find a MAGA route to the sea through north east Maryland and on down the all-red east shore of the Chesapeake Bay to Denton, Maryland

To this point, the Delaware counties immediately to the east had been all blue, but the southernmost Delaware county, Sussex, is red as Rudolph’s nose.

Our pilgrims slip into their MAGA beach gear and head due east from Denton, smiling all the way. They have just realized that the quickest and most natural red-county drive across America culminates in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

In Rehoboth, our pilgrims stop for directions. Seeing their gear and their California license plate, the friendly gas station attendant asks about their journey. When they explain, he chuckles, “The Biden beach house is right down the way.”

Who said God doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Jack Cashill’s newest book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is available in all formats.