Just how Republican is the Santa Clarita Valley? It’s an important question ahead of next week’s Super Tuesday vote. We already know, for instance, that contributions to GOP candidates outpace contributions to Democratic candidates by a factor at least 4 to 1 in Santa Clarita based on public Federal Election Commission data, but that’s just a dry, boring statistic. You read SCVTalk and therefore you want more.

Leave it to the fine liberal folks at Huffington Post to deliver the next evolution in understanding how Republican the SCV is: the FundRace 2008 map.

Yes, that’s right. Now, for the first time, you can literally see -in living, vivid color- just how Red this valley is thanks to the mash-up of FEC data and Google’s superb mapping application.

Drag your mouse over Newhall. A red dot signifies $1,000 for Thompson, bet that guy’s disappointed.

Check out Castaic Junction…that big red dot represents our local King of Concrete, who cares enough about Romney to donate $2,300 to his campaign.

Over in tony, secluded Sand Canyon is a dot -much smaller than the concrete king’s- with Bob Kellar’s name on it. The City Councilman/Mayor/Realtor/Former Cop also donated to Romney, though he only signed a check for $1,000.

The map isn’t complete, or even perfect. It mistakes a zip code search of 91355 for someplace in the Bay Area. But if you type in Santa Clarita, you’ll see our humble valley take center stage.

Sure there are a lot of blue dots on the screen too. What’s interesting is that most of them seem to belong to women donating a few hundred here or a thousand there to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson. Few are names you would recognize from the pantheon of local power brokers, business leaders or lobbying superstars, but they are there nonetheless.

Absent from the map (unfortunately) is data from the 91381 zip code : the monied West Siders, who, according to FEC data, have donated some $73,000 for the 2008 campaign, the vast majority of it to either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani. You’ll have to do some searches on OpenSecrets.org for more on that. It’s definitely worth a look: per capita, West Siders seem to give more than those of us living in the lowlands of 91321 or 91355.

As for those of you living north of Soledad or east of Bouquet? Well let’s just say that our neighbors there don’t seem to be as interested in donating to any of the candidates.

Even though the SCV is largely pocked by red dots, we’re still in a sea of blue: Los Angeles County as a whole has given some $6.3 million to Hillary Clinton.

Be sure to check back to HuffPost’s map in the days ahead. The FEC is due any minute now to release fundraising data from the fourth quarter of 2007, and if current data is any indication, we’ll probably see more red dots on the map.Enjoy!