A common misconception is that republicans gain their largest margins of votes from rural areas. This is not entirely accurate. In many states, the largest republican vote margins actually come from densely populated exurban areas. As you can see here when you remove these areas, you can create quite dramatic political shifts.
Posted by Not_EllaK
28 Comments
People live in cities
You’re taking away the most populated GOP areas and leaving in the blue cities obviously the state will be blue. If your hypothesis is right you should take out the entire metropolitan area the urban, suburban and exurban areas. The states will be red if you do that.
Umm… what? I don’t understand what your argument is nor how this map is evidence
This is a really cool insight into this phenomena and I could go on for quite a bit about all the different moving parts at play here. To keep it brief, this does align with an anecdotal observation and outlook that I’ve been tossing around.
The middle and upper middle class exurbanites are the January 6th defendants. They’re the ones with the Trump trucks and taking over school boards. Lots of flak gets tossed towards truly rural people, but I reckon they hardly give two shits about poltics and aren’t nearly as far down the neo-conservative far-right rabbit hole that these annoying ass facebook addicted culture war waging exurban Karens have all gone down. They sit out there in their little domiciles cosplaying country folk while working their fancy jobs and recreating in the urban centers they so detest. They have no real challenges or strife, so they are constantly ready to be fed the next line about how a migrant is gonna come murder them and turn their kids trans. They sit in absolute peace and safety, fantasizing about going guns blazing into the scary world they’ve conjured up in their heads from the most milquetoast and unoffensive places imagineable. It all feels like a big farce.
I would love to see this for Missouri
For once I think there is actually additional information beyond “people live in cities” to this one. I would phrase it as “Population density decreases as you move away from city centers. Republican vote share increases as you move away from city centers. So Republican votes – I.e. Republican margin times population – is concentrated in the exurbs.” Not super surprising but still slightly more nuanced than the usual map of cities.
I’ll testify to that. I live in deep rural Texas. It’s the spirit of the frontier still persisting to some degree, I think.
Out where living is hard people cant be getting all picky about who helps out. Black? Brown? Woman? Gay?… Can you ride a horse? Can you dig a post hole? You’re hired!!!
Exact same type of person who drives a lifted pickup truck
I don’t understand the point. Yes, there are plenty of Trump voters that live in the suburbs. Nobody questioned that. Then you go color rural areas “blue” that voted 65-80% Trump.
Minnesota, too. Very blue in the Twin Cities, surrounded by red. The rest of the state, as I suspect for others, too, is more mixed. There are parts of MN and the NC mountains, that are red and not near any major city.
Take out the biggest Republicans areas and states become less Republican? Shocker. Next thing you’ll be telling me if you take out Chicagoland Illinois is red
“There are no blue states, only blue urban cores.” Same reductive vibes
What software was used to create this?
r/DavesRedistricting mentioned
What you mean to say is there are no blue states, only blue inner cities. The suburbs and rural areas are red.
Ringworm spots
Yep. These are the middle and upper class, dominated white, who refuse to mingle with “the others.” The subdivisions are exclusive, the golf courses even more so, and the schools are private.
Douglas County, CO is a great example, right outside of Denver.
Eye opening!
texas voting rate is like 20% or some shit
Seems like this would work with Wisconsin and the WOW counties too.
Lots of people missing the point in the comments here. This is a really interesting way of reframing the common trope that it’s as simple as “blue cities and red states”
Clearly not looking at Wyoming
Largest GAINS, because many of those rural areas were already consistently voting 80-90% Republican.
I have a large desire to create a dashboard now.
Pennsylvania would be interesting to see.
how do you define exurb?
2024 TX and SC would be red. Alaska would be really close.
You can easily make the same type of map for Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. Not counting Pennsylvania since it’s more of a pure “urban/rural” divide.
“All the Republican votes come from suburbs when you ignore the votes that come from rural areas”
North Carolina and Georgia are interesting to look at here cause that blue urban core is only stretching further out year by year. Like the Raleigh-Durham area isn’t a major source of Republican support at all, and you have to get pretty far out into the Atlanta metro before you get into majority Republican areas