Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Looking for patterns in the House fiscal cliff vote

Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. Leading Off:

' Votes: Tuesday's House vote on the fiscal cliff is one of those rare votes where you don't get a straight party line vote like most contentious votes, but one where the House shatters into pieces and the winner is the side that reassembles the most fragments. Of course, this time it was Nancy Pelosi who did that, putting together a strange coalition of most of the Dems (minus a few defections on the caucus's left and right flanks), plus the bulk of the establishmentarian and/or moderate Republicans (including the vote of John Boehner himself, no "moderate" but certainly "establishment").

On the Republican side, there were 85 yes and 151 no votes (with 5 non-votes, from Ann Marie Buerkle, Dan Burton, Sam Graves, Jerry Lewis, and Ron Paul). That's too many votes to replicate the entire list, but there was a significant geographic dichotomy here, one that seems to support the larger idea that the GOP is increasingly becoming a regional rump party. The New York Times has a helpful interactive map that puts that into stark relief.

Of those 85 yes votes, only 13 were Republicans from the Census-defined "southern" states, and many of those were either ones with ties to leadership (ex-NRCC chairs Tom Cole and Pete Sessions, Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers) or ones with atypical, moderate districts in Florida (Mario Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Bill Young). Rodney Alexander, Kevin Brady, Howard Coble, Ander Crenshaw, John Sullivan, Mac Thornberry, and Steve Womack, most of whom are also pretty establishment-flavored, round out the list.

And of those 151 no votes, 59 were from non-southern states. That may still seem like a lot, but bear in mind most of the rest of those 59 were from the GOP's other strongholds, the Mountain West and Great Plains. Maybe more striking is the number of GOP no votes that came from the Northeast: a grand total of two, from recently defeated Frank Guinta and from New Jersey's Scott Garrett. (Actually, it adds up to four if you break with the Census Bureau and consider Maryland to be a northeastern state, which would include Andy Harris and the outgoing Roscoe Bartlett.)

Much more below the fold ....