![]() ![]() But that doesn’t mean Republicans and Democrats live next to each other in these places it may just mean that the larger region is politically segregated, leaving the whole city as essentially a one-party enclave.) Those calculations generated a ranking of the country’s most politically segregated cities.How do 2020 presidential election results correlate with population density? (One drawback of this method: A place that votes almost uniformly for one party - Democrat-soaked San Jose, California, for example - will have a low dissimilarity score. This technique is most often used to measure racial segregation, but political scientists have also used it to calculate partisan segregation. basically, a number that tells us how separated its Republicans and Democrats are from one another, with higher numbers indicating more segregation. ![]() To see just how politically segregated America’s urban areas are, we used each city’s 2016 election results to calculate its dissimilarity index 3 A dissimilarity index measures the share of a given population that would need to relocate in order for that population to be evenly distributed across a larger metro area. rural ignores all the forces that tug people apart within urban areas. Describing political polarization as urban vs. Lily Geismer, a professor of political and urban history at Claremont McKenna College, said the old red-blue dichotomy has “actually been replaced by this kind of urban-rural split.” But that way of looking at things isn’t as nuanced as it needs to be, she said. That complicates what we tend to hear about Americans’ political segregation, which is often defined in sweeping urban vs. “Even if you look within the same census tract or the same ZIP code or the same precinct, and even if you’re in a place like Manhattan, Republicans will search out the less-dense part to live in,” said Steven Webster, a political scientist at Washington University. Many of those urban areas aren’t small, tightly packed areas like Manhattan but sprawling, low-density regions like Phoenix, say, or Jacksonville, Florida.Īcross the country, Republicans in urban areas are more likely to be found in the less-centralized, lower-density neighborhoods. ![]() the share of votes that went to one of the two major parties, ignoring third-party votes and write-in candidates. ![]() In more than half of the country’s 153 biggest urban areas, Democrats got between 40 and 60 percent of the 2016 two-party vote share 2 Democrats got more than 60 percent of the two-party vote in about a third of these urban areas, and got less than 40 percent in about 10 percent. When you expand the definition of urban areas beyond their downtown areas, cities start to look less Democratic and less densely populated. Part of that process has been accounting for growing levels of urban sprawl and the increasing fuzziness of the lines between suburban and rural areas. The agency defines urbanized areas based on population density and how the land is used, and it has been adapting that definition for over 100 years as Americans’ settlement patterns have changed. You may notice that the map includes areas that you don’t consider urban. Census Bureau, Map tiles by Stamen Design ( CC By 3.0), Map data by OpenStreetMap contributors closest to you look like in 2016?įiveThirtyEight SOURCES: Decision Desk HQ, U.S. What did the political landscape of the city 1 Includes only urbanized areas with a population of 250,000 or more, as defined by the U.S. But it’s also a sign of how centuries of American history have shaped and continue to shape where we live - and who our neighbors are.īut before we get to the sociology, let’s dig in to the geography. It’s a sign of our polarized times that these Republicans aren’t evenly distributed across the city, of course. Much has been made of the country’s urban-rural political divide, but almost every Democratic city has Republican enclaves, especially when you think about cities as more than just their downtowns. The more densely populated the place, the more Democratic the voters.īut just because Republicans aren’t winning in cities doesn’t mean that no Republicans live there. Even FiveThirtyEight couldn’t resist joining in: In December, Galen Druke and I showed how America’s cities and tightly packed suburbs shifted toward Democrats in the most recent midterm election. Politicians bring up America’s deep-blue cities constantly, including in stump speeches and in every debate over the Electoral College. Researchers have tracked the way Democrats have dominated in cities since the ’90s. We’ve heard it over and over: Democratic candidates win cities. ![]()
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