FAIRFIELD, TEXAS—I generally think of my home county—Freestone County in east-central Texas—as one of the reddest places in America. When I join the small crowd to watch the dry-erase numbers marked on a whiteboard at the Courthouse Square tonight, I won’t be at all surprised to see John McCain take a good, solid sixty percent of the vote. But exploring the neighborhoods and front lawns of Freestone County this week, I’ve learned some things about my hometown I didn’t know. Enough to convince me that perhaps “red state, blue state”—our color-coded electoral-map legend turned political cliché—may drastically oversimplify it all.

Before I took my drive around the county, I spent a few hours playing with Google’s new stunningly exhaustive “historical results” map, which allows you to zoom down to the county level and look at the exact percentage splits from 1980 to 2008. Texas has gone red in all seven presidential elections since 1980, but Freestone County is another story. In 1980, the first election on record, Freestone went blue, with 52% of our electorate supporting Jimmy Carter. It did again in 1992, when Ross Perot’s candidacy helped Clinton win a 38% majority. (Freestone responded with a disapproving color-change in 1994, but our neighboring counties did not, meaning a great number of Texas counties supported Clinton twice.) So maybe my little county, shaped like a miniature District of Columbia, isn’t quite the definition of “red” that I previously thought.

Still, it’s difficult to imagine the people I grew up with (and probably know a lot better than I know my new neighbors in New York City) not supporting a decorated war veteran with a feisty gun-and-oil-loving running mate. The vivacious, elderly Republican ladies I run into at the post office? They probably don’t think John McCain is the “lesser of two evils.” They relate to the whole “I was hot when I was young” thing. So, with an unscheduled afternoon and some crude, unscientific methods, I set off to find out.

I followed the lone Obama sign first. The black neighborhoods were generally free of political signage—not a county commissioner endorsement in sight. I saw a total of four more Obama signs, every single one in a freshly mowed, well-kept lawn. But for the number of houses, signs were conspicuously absent. A youngish white man was carrying tools toward one of the Obama-emblazoned houses from his gleaming white Dodge pickup. He might be evidence of white Obama voters in Freestone County, or he might have been Joe the Plumber making a house call. Alas, the uncertainties of drive-by reporting.

Next, I navigated toward a lower-middle-class, mostly white neighborhood. Out of the forty to fifty lawns I scouted, only two sported presidential signage—both McCain-Palin. That’s even fewer than I located in the black neighborhoods. But the even more curious thing: somewhere around seventy percent were adorned with some sort of American flag. I’ve never seen so many front yards with flagpoles, or ever thought about how odd it would look to fly a massive flag over one’s small driveway. One mailbox was painted into a flag; another was papered over in flag stickers. Two giant flags hung from the wall of one open garage. At every corner, stars and stripes flapped in the warm November breeze. The gods of patriotism must love this street.

Last stop. Just outside the city limits of Fairfield, my hometown and the seat of Freestone County, lie a couple of upper-crust neighborhoods. The houses are spaced further apart, with elegant, immaculately groomed lawns and curvy driveways stretching between them. And, exactly as I expected, these neighborhoods are thick with McCain signs. Where one in twenty houses in every other area I passed had posted a sign, here it was more like one in five. A few homeowners had even taken advantage of their highway-front lawns to erect four-by-eight foot announcements of their McCain-Palin loyalty.

I’m not sure what Freestone County says about the election or the country. Probably nothing. Just because our elites vote Republican doesn’t mean all elites do, as we well know. But there are two little things to take away. First: whether it’s the red highway-front lawns of Texas or the blue brownstone windows of Manhattan, the people with the most money tend to care the most about politics. Second: no matter which color a county goes, it’s rarely by a huge margin. One side gets the win, but there are always almost just as many people on the other. Both lessons are worth remembering.