What is going on here? Big republican gains in cities, blue gains everywhere else. Anecdotally it checks out in my circles: lots of right-leaning friends in SF, NYC, Miami, LA. But why?
And what's going on out there in the countryside? I imagine a vast hinterland full of HR managers, diversity respecters, and Minnesota christians, but what's the reality? Woke morality going downmarket while the urban elite innovates a new elitist political fashion? Fashionable urbanites veblen signaling independence from the corpo HR borg their uncool friends just spent a decade imposing on the hinterland? Is it just Kamala's plane-ticket-Americans parachuted into polling stations across the country? Curious for takes.
>>3180 We are at that point that shitlibbery is the conservative position. Boomers retiring in the country side away from actual issues are libtards. Younger people and elites in cities (mostly men) actually have to face the consequences of the last 50 + years of politics now. I'd wager that in terms of fashion blue beliefs are now seen as uncool, too dominant for too long. Elites need a way to distinguish themselves and signal that they are not "uncool".
Let's not confuse relative changes with absolute numbers. For example, that map makes it look like California might have been competitive, but in fact Harris won California by a huge margin, 58% to Trump's 38%.
>>3183 yeah this is important but the question stands. The urban liberal dominance is still huge, but we may just be early in the process. It's the direction of change that's interesting here.
Great question! I think it's useful to look at election results and polls to understand how political coalitions are shifting.
Here's what I notice: 1. The top tier cities (LA, SF, NYC, and Chicago) are trending red, a break from the old pattern 2. The two most conservative cities (Houston and Miami) are continuing to trend red, continuing the old pattern 3. Cities on the TX border (El Paso and the Brownsville area) are trending red, a break from the old pattern. Maybe Albuquerque is also reacting to the immigration situation, but Phoenix breaks that pattern. 4. Detroit, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque have trended red, and I don't know why. 5. All other cities have trended blue (Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, Omaha, Kansas City, Dallas, Austin, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, Huntsville, Birmingham, and more). 6. Rural counties are significantly under-represented in this image, indicating that they mostly shifted in different directions between 2020 and 2024. 7. There may be some sort of suburb effect going on. Notice how the Los Angeles area only has one county with a consistent trend whereas the SF Bay Area has multiple counties trending red. Atlanta has both the urban core and the "collar counties" trending blue, whereas Houston's urban core is trending red while its suburbs are trending blue. Though it's unclear in the graph if the large dots are actually the urban core - they could just be the largest county with a consistent shift, but not the core urban county.
Here are a few guesses at what explains these trends: 1. Obviously a reaction to immigration can be seen in the Texas border cities, and maaaybe in Albuquerque and Miami. But Phoenix, Dallas, and Austin (all close to the border) break that pattern. 2. What explains the divergence in trend between the top 4 cities and all the other cities? Are the largest cities experiencing uniquely acute changes in immigration, crime/disorder, cost of living increases, etc.? Are people reacting to local issues in their vote for president? 3. Personally I don't think that urban vs. rural is the primary cleavage in the current realignment, and I don't think that cities are the right unit of analysis. I think that the shift is seen most clearly in educational attainment, race, gender, and age. And I think that the shifts in cities merely reflects their demographic makeup and the shifts within those demographics. **I'd be very interested to know to what extent the major cities show different demographic shifts than the country as a whole.**
Something really important to notice when it comes to shifting political demographics is that "woke" has invaded basically everywhere regardless of the urban/rural divide. There are nonbinary social rejects working your local gas station in a town of 14,000. Most of it is, as said above, a result of boomers moving. However, it's also a result of boomers/Gen X trying to maintain relationships with their kids/grandkids at any cost, and this includes using their vote as emotional capital.
Wait a minute. The earlier NYT map seems to contradict this, and shows a bunch of counties moving to the right from the 2020 to 2024 presidential elections, which the OP's map claims shifted left. What's going on?
OP's map is classic wily New York Times deception, the three-cups-and-a-ball trick applied to facts and data.
> This map highlights every US county that shifted in the same direction in 2020 and 2024 [...] **relative to what we'd expect from national trends since 2016**.
They normed the whole thing such that a county shifting the same amount as the overall US electorate counts as 0 change. This is why there's blue on the map.
>>3201 ah sneaky sneaky. Nevermind deepfakes. We have the New York Times. So this is not absolute change, but relative to overall shift. So that means that the blue shift in the rural areas is fake, but the red shift in cities is real and even bigger than they are admitting.
