As New Census Numbers Show, the Biggest Divide Isn't North v. South Anymore—It's Metro v. Rural

On Thursday, the Census Bureau released the 2020 census data for cities, counties, and other geographic subdivisions. Just as with the state-level numbers announced in April, there were some surprises. Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the nation's ten largest cities showing an increased growth rate compared to the 2000 to 2010 period. At the same time, most of rural America shrank in absolute as well as relative terms. A majority—52 percent—of the nation's counties actually reported a smaller raw population in 2020 than they had in 2010:

Many rural areas have been stagnant and struggling for a long time, but the distinct trajectories of big-city and small-town life have seldom been as divergent—and as connected to partisan politics—as they became over the past decade. Kathy Cramer's fieldwork in Wisconsin during the late 2000s and early 2010s found a prevailing sentiment of political alienation among rural voters, who perceived their communities as suffering a steady economic and cultural decline for which they often blamed greedy and decadent urbanites. An existing collective preference for the Republican Party among this heavily white, socially traditionalist population was soon super-charged by Donald Trump's brand of nostalgic populist nationalism, producing record Republican electoral margins in rural precincts from coast to coast in 2016.

But Trump's policies as president did not solve the long-term problems facing rural residents, or reduce the financial and cultural opportunities that migration to larger population centers can offer their children and grandchildren. The invocations of a nation fallen from past glories that resonated so strongly in small-town America inspired less enthusiasm among the residents of racially diverse, increasingly well-educated metropolitan municipalities, where even the challenges of daily life—high costs of living, insufficient housing supply, traffic congestion—often reflect the byproducts of growth and success rather than decline and decay. Prosperous suburban enclaves that once served as reliable sources of support for the mass Republican Party (such as Orange County, California; Loudoun County, Virginia; and Cobb County, Georgia) continued to shift steadily toward the blue end of the partisan spectrum in response to Trump's rise.

The fundamental geographic division in American politics has traditionally been a sectional conflict setting the North against the South. The idioms of "red states" and "blue states" caught on widely after the 2000 presidential election because they could be applied to a regional divide—blue North, red South—that was already presumed to reflect the main axis of political debate and competition. But the partisan difference between large-metro and rural residents has now become much larger than the gap between northerners and southerners.

Until 1996, the difference in presidential voting between residents of the nation's largest 20 metropolitan areas and inhabitants of rural (non-metropolitan) counties resembled the difference between the South (defined here as the eleven states of the former Confederacy plus West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma) and the North (defined as all other states from the Atlantic coast west to Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri). Between 2000 and 2008, the urbanism gap was somewhat, though not dramatically, larger than the regional gap. By 2016 and 2020, however, the partisan difference between large metros and rural areas had become fully three times as large as the North-South difference, which had visibly narrowed (from 12 to 9 percentage points) from its 2008 peak.

Look inside practically any state in the country and you'll find blue dots corresponding to its densent and most populous urban centers, each surrounded by a sea of red rural hinterlands. The regional divide has declined since 2008 because the urban precincts of the South have grown bluer over time while the rural territories of the North have gotten redder, both shedding some of their sectional distinctiveness in the face of a consistent nationwide trend. This gave Donald Trump the ability to flip a few northern states with significant rural populations from blue to red in 2016 (such as Iowa and Wisconsin), while Joe Biden likewise outperformed previous Democratic nominees in Georgia and Texas in 2020 by winning the large metro areas of greater Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston—none of which had been carried by Barack Obama in his 2012 victory.

In a widening electoral conflict between urban and rural America, one might think that it would be clear which side holds the strategic advantage. More than twice as many voters live in one of the top 20 metro areas as reside in all rural counties combined, and the results of the new 2020 census reveal that the American population is becoming more collectively metropolitan at an accelerating rate. Even in states where they control the post-census redistricting process, Republicans will face the challenge of needing to accommodate the declining numbers of their loyal rural constituency.

But as the figure above reveals, Republicans' plight as the rural party of a increasingly non-rural nation has so far been balanced out by the fact that rural America has moved toward the GOP at a faster pace since the 1990s than urban America has shifted away. When combined with the structural biases of the electoral college and Senate in favor of rural voters, the current Republican popular coalition can easily remain fully competitive in national elections. The intensifying conflict between city and country has had a number of important consequences for how each party operates, which voters it attracts, and which states and districts it is likely to win, but it does not show any signs of ending the perennially close competition for control of the federal government that has become a distinctive characteristic of our current age.

2020 Was as Geographically Polarized as 2016, But Biden Did Just a Little Better in the Right Places

The idea of Joe Biden as a depolarizing figure, someone who aimed to transcend rather than exacerbate the nation's political divisions, was both a dominant rhetorical theme of his campaign and a major strategic premise behind his nomination. In particular, Biden was supposed to be uniquely appealing to the type of white, older, modestly-educated, socially traditionalist voter who had wandered away from the Democratic Party sometime between Barack Obama's first victory and Hillary Clinton's last defeat. A candidate who won back a significant share of this electoral bloc while receiving the energized support of the groups alienated by Trumpism—cultural liberals, metropolitan professionals, young people—would be in excellent position to gain the kind of decisive national victory that many polls suggested Biden would achieve.

In the end, that didn't happen. Whatever demographic and stylistic differences distinguished Biden from Clinton or Obama failed to change enough votes to reorder the fundamental electoral constituencies of both major parties. The geographic polarization that has defined 21st century American politics remains fully intact—but a few incremental improvements in Democratic performance turned out to be just strong enough, and well-located enough, to eke out an electoral college majority.

Most states continue to be faithfully Democratic or Republican in presidential elections. By 2016, statewide popular margins had grown to differ with the national popular vote by an average of 20 percentage points, meaning that an election in which the candidates split the national vote 50-50 would produce a typical state margin that was a 60-40 landslide for one side or the other. Biden didn't succeed in healing this particular national divide, as the average state margin remained at 20 percent in 2020:

Below the state level, geographic polarization has been primarily fueled by a widening partisan gap between large metropolitan areas turning deeper blue and rural counties turning brighter red. This divide also remained virtually unchanged between 2016 and 2020. Biden very slightly outperformed Hillary Clinton in the nation's 20 largest metro areas, winning 62 percent of the two-party vote there—the best performance since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he only improved on her 2016 showing in non-metropolitan counties by half a percentage point—33.7% to 33.2%—despite expectations that he would prove to be a much more appealing candidate among the whites without college degrees who dominate most rural electorates. Trump nearly matched his own record rural performance of four years before, winning a greater share of the non-metro vote than even Ronald Reagan had received in his 49-state landslide of 1984:

The main reason why Biden didn't do even better than he did within Top 20 metros was a pro-Trump national shift among non-white voters, especially Hispanics. His biggest single underperformance compared to Clinton in 2016 occurred in metro Miami, but he also lost ground in greater Los Angeles, San Jose/San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Orlando. This trend helped to put Florida and Ohio out of reach for the Democratic ticket, but it was otherwise concentrated in non-competitive states where the party could well afford to lose votes.

In fact, a countervailing rise in Democratic support in 2020 among the voters of metro Atlanta, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Detroit helped Biden narrowly carry four pivotal states that Clinton had lost, while improved Democratic performance in metro Washington, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Boston gave Biden more electoral breathing room than Clinton had had in Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire—all virtually must-wins for a Democratic presidential nominee. So while the overall Democratic vote share in top 20 metro areas only increased very slightly between 2016 and 2020, it was more fortuitously distributed from the perspective of electoral college strategy.

As the second figure above reveals, the biggest aggregate movement toward the Democrats in 2020 occurred within metro areas outside the Top 20. These other 251 metro areas cast somewhat fewer collective votes (41% of the total two-party vote in 2020, compared to 45% for the Top 20 metros). But their lower levels of racial diversity meant that the ongoing pro-Democratic trend among college-educated whites was less likely to be numerically counteracted by racial minorities' movement towards Trump. 

Biden rarely exceeded Clinton's vote share by a dramatic amount in the smaller metros, but he consistently outperformed her by 1–3 percent across the nation (except for a few heavily Hispanic areas in Texas and California). His modest improvement in places like metro Pittsburgh and Harrisburg (Pennsylvania), Grand Rapids and Lansing (Michigan), and Milwaukee and Madison (Wisconsin) turned out to be critical elements of his precarious electoral college majority, and he was also able to carry the single Nebraska electoral vote from the metro Omaha-based 2nd congressional district that, under a plausible alternate scenario, might have given him exactly the number of electors needed to win the presidency.

It's possible that Trump had a unique appeal to certain small-town voters who might be more open to voting Democratic in future elections when he isn't on the ballot. But Democrats' retrospective interpretations of 2020 are more likely to focus on the apparent patterns of defection among urban minorities than the attrition of rural whites, which is a longer-term trend with fewer obvious implementable solutions. The continued decay among less-educated white citizens presents Democratic leaders with serious challenges in building a sustainable national electoral advantage, given this constituency's especially important geographic distribution. But if the culture wars have so alienated these voters that even Scranton Joe can't win them back, Democrats may conclude that, win or lose, the party's future inevitably lies in another direction.

The New Electoral Map Isn't Very New, But Biden's Lead Keeps the Battleground From Shrinking

We're now in the home stretch of the 2020 presidential campaign, with millions of ballots already cast via early and mail-in voting. The two candidates and their advisors are now making final decisions about where to allocate resources—ad spending, voter mobilization operations, and travel by the nominees and their running mates, spouses‚ and top surrogates—based on their current appraisals of optimal electoral college strategy.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton actively contested 14 states between them in 2016, collectively casting 32 percent of the nation's electoral votes. In the wake of the last election, however, most analysts expected the geographic scope of electoral competition to shrink in 2020. Trump's comfortable victories in Ohio (by 8 percentage points) and Iowa (by more than 9), along with his unexpected strength across the rest of the Midwest, seemed to signal that these two perennial battleground states were no longer pivotal and might be justifiably conceded to the Republicans in the future, while the pro-Democratic shift evident in sections of the Sun Belt from 2012 to 2016 wasn't clearly strong enough yet to push traditionally "red" bastions like Georgia and Texas into legitimate partisan competitiveness.

These expectations were all perfectly reasonable extrapolations from the 2016 results. But they rested on assumptions of another tight contest in 2020, rather than the clear and consistent Democratic lead—now flirting with double digits in the national popular vote—that actually emerged. Joe Biden's overall advantage has allowed him to remain viable in Ohio and Iowa despite their recent Republican leanings while also mounting an incursion into Georgia and Texas, both uncontested by Democratic presidential candidates since the 1990s. The only two states to drop out of the battleground category between 2016 and 2020 were Virginia and Colorado, both already swiftly moving in a Democratic direction but put altogether out of reach for the Republicans by a poor national climate for the party this year.

Contrary to previous suggestions of a shrinking battleground map, then, the presidential campaigns are once again contesting 14 states in 2020 (plus the single electoral vote awarded to the winner of Nebraska's 2nd congressional district). The replacement of Virginia and Colorado with the more populous states of Texas and Georgia means that the candidates are actually fighting over more presidential electors than last time—in fact, as the figure below demonstrates, the battleground this year is the largest in terms of electoral votes since the 2000 election:

Figure adapted from Red Fighting Blue: 

How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics

It's often hard in the moment to separate short-term variation from long-term trends, to distinguish changes that are harbingers of the future from those that are merely temporary deviations from the norm. The assumption that 2016 foreshadowed a more permanent fading of Democratic fortunes in the Great Lakes states as the party built a new regional base in the metropolitan South and Southwest was reasonable enough, but may well turn out to be at least a bit premature. Predictions that the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee would perform better in Arizona (carried once by the party in the last 17 presidential elections) than Wisconsin (carried seven times in the past eight elections) aren't consistent with the polls so far; as of today, the FiveThirtyEight polling average shows Biden leading Trump by 8 points in Wisconsin and 4 points in Arizona. 

Polls so far indicate a fairly uniform swing between 2016 and 2020. Biden seems to be improving on Clinton's performance by a roughly comparable margin pretty much everywhere, though it wouldn't be surprising if this shift turned out to be a bit bigger in the Midwest than the Sun Belt given that he is apparently doing a better job winning back senior citizens and non-college whites from Trump than he is in outperforming Clinton's showing among young voters and racial minorities.

At the same time, it's a legitimately important development that Arizona, Texas, and Georgia are all potentially competitive states in federal elections, even if (at least for now) it requires a 10-point national popular vote margin (and a record-breaking fundraising haul) for Democrats to put all three in contention. The changing partisan alignments of a few individual states should be understood in the proper context of what is overall a historically stable electoral map. But in an era of closely-matched and highly polarized national parties, even small shifts in geographic coalitions can have big consequences for the outcome of elections and the governance of the nation.

The South Is Still Very Republican—But Southern Democrats Aren't "Southern Democrats" Anymore

In an era of historically stable electoral maps, any hint of novelty is likely to attract a much greater degree of attention than its true importance would warrant. And so recent signs of an electoral trend favoring Democratic candidates in certain corners of the South have been repeatedly touted as earth-shaking developments; Friday's Wall Street Journal even refers to a potential "realignment" in the region. If the news media's prototypical voter of interest after the 2016 election was the (pro-Trump) working-class white resident of a small midwestern town, in 2020 the new objects of fascination are the (anti-Trump) well-educated professionals and voters of color populating the suburbs of large southern cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Houston.

But the South as a whole is still very Republican—in fact, it remains the main source of popular support for the national Republican Party. Among the 14 southern states (defined here as the 11 members of the former Confederacy plus West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma), Democrats have built an overall advantage in just one (Virginia), and in only Florida and North Carolina are the two parties closely matched at the state level. Across the rest of the region, Republicans control all 22 state legislative chambers, 9 of 11 governorships (having lost only Kentucky and Louisiana by narrow margins in off-year elections to replace unpopular Republican incumbents), 20 of 22 U.S. Senate seats (all but those held by Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Doug Jones of Alabama, the last an accidental special election winner who is unlikely to retain his seat this fall), nearly every other statewide office, and 74 of 101 U.S. House seats.

The Democratic Party hit a historic low point in the South during the 2014–2016 period and has made a bit of a comeback since then, as it has elsewhere in the country. But this partisan rebound has so far been mostly restricted to a few major metropolitan areas, flipping some congressional and state legislative seats to Democratic challengers without yet dismantling the power of a formerly dominant state Republican Party. Yes, Beto O'Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia represented tantalizing near-miss candidacies for Democrats in 2018, though both also benefited from flawed opponents and unusually favorable national partisan conditions—the same electoral assets that have so far kept Joe Biden within reach of carrying both states this year. But if national polls start to tighten before November, the Biden campaign will probably retreat to defend pivotal states elsewhere, abandoning the ambitious but unnecessary goal of making additional inroads in the South.

In general, the change so far in the southern Democratic Party's electoral strength has received too much attention and the change in its internal complexion has received too little. Old-style southern Democrats—the kind with rural constituencies, good-ol'-boy personas, and philosophical discomfort with the northern wing of the party on issues from abortion and gun control to environmental regulation and energy policy—are nearly extinct in elective office; Manchin, Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards, and one or two House members are just about the last of this breed above the local level. The newer generations of southern Democratic politicians are much more likely to be drawl-less metropolitans, often first- or second-generation transplants from outside the region. Many of them are members of racial minority groups, even in majority-white constituencies. And they are mostly not ideological misfits within the national Democratic Party, instead sitting squarely inside the prevailing Obama-Biden pragmatic liberal mainstream on economic and social issues alike.

When Democrats gained a majority in both houses of the Virginia legislature last November, achieving unified control of state government for the first time in decades, they immediately demonstrated how much the state party had evolved since the days when it was led by conservative-leaning figures like Harry Byrd and Howard "Judge" Smith. The burst of legislative activity that ensued not only raised the state minimum wage and imposed regulations on energy producers; it also loosened restrictions on abortion, banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, closed the "gun show loophole" by requiring background checks for all firearm purchases, decriminalized marijuana possession, and allowed local governments to remove Confederate monuments. This is the contemporary policy agenda of regular national Democrats, making few concessions to the distinctive cultural commitments of traditional southern politics, and any future Democratic majority in North Carolina, Florida, Texas, or Georgia is more likely to follow Virginia's lead than to attempt to revive the old style of governing.

Even if they benefit from another "blue wave" this year, Democrats are still a long way away from true competitiveness in most of the South. But the evolution of its main sources of electoral support in the region is important for the behavior of the party at the national level. Democrats elected from southern congressional seats are less likely to be as serious an impediment to the legislative agenda of the next Democratic president as they were to that of Obama or Bill Clinton, in part because the constituencies that they represent are less self-consciously "southern," less alienated from national left-of-center politics, and moving toward, rather than away from, the Democratic Party over time. Republicans are still very much the party of the South, but Democrats are hoping to eventually become the party of the New South.

"New" States Get the Hype, But the Electoral Map Hasn't Changed Much in 2020

To a certain type of election-watcher, there are few things more exciting than witnessing a state that was once loyally partisan transform into a fiercely contested battleground. Recent public opinion surveys suggesting that Joe Biden is running a close race against Donald Trump in Texas and Georgia—two traditional Republican bastions that have not been competitive in presidential elections since the 1990s—and now leads in Arizona, which has voted Democratic for president only once (1996) in the past 70 years, have, unsurprisingly, received widespread attention from political commentators.

But the complete picture of the emerging electoral map in 2020 reveals far more continuity than change. The current era of presidential elections is distinguished by a historically unmatched degree of consistency in state-level partisan alignments, as depicted in this chart from my book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics:

Of the 37 states (plus the District of Columbia) that voted for the same party's nominees in each of the five presidential elections between 2000 and 2016, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas seem to be the only plausible candidates to break their streak in 2020—unless the next few months turn so dramatically in Donald Trump's favor that he manages to carry Minnesota or Maine. But even the potential addition of new Sun Belt territory to the familiar Midwest-centered battleground state map doesn't mean that there has been a significant partisan realignment of the South or Southwest over the past four years. What the close recent polls in these states really indicate is not that Trump has developed an unusual regional weakness, but rather that Biden now has a national lead strong enough to pull a few Republican-leaning states into the "competitive" category.

If we compare the two-party popular vote outcome in 2016 with today's two-party polling margin as estimated by The Economist's daily forecasting model for the 16 states where both parties received at least 45 percent of the vote in the last election, we see (after accounting for sampling error and variations in data quality) what looks like a fairly uniform pro-Democratic shift nationwide:

New Mexico	Clinton +9	Biden +13	Change: +4 D
Virginia	Clinton +6	Biden +11	Change: +5 D
Colorado	Clinton +5	Biden +14	Change: +9 D
Maine	Clinton +3	Biden +10	Change: +7 D
Nevada	Clinton +3	Biden +7	Change: +4 D
Minnesota	Clinton +2	Biden +9	Change: +7 D
New Hampshire	Clinton +0	Biden +6	Change: +6 D
Michigan	Trump +0	Biden +8	Change: +8 D
Pennsylvania	Trump +1	Biden +5	Change: +6 D
Wisconsin	Trump +1	Biden +6	Change: +7 D
Florida	Trump +1	Biden +4	Change: +5 D
Arizona	Trump +4	Biden +3	Change: +7 D
North Carolina	Trump +4	Biden +2	Change: +6 D
Georgia	Trump +5	Trump +0	Change: +5 D
Ohio	Trump +9	Biden +1	Change: +10 D
Texas	Trump +9	Trump +3	Change: +6 D
Iowa	Trump +10	Trump +2	Change: +8 D
NATIONAL	Clinton +2	Biden +8	Change: +6 D

Polling estimates are, of course, inexact, and all three of the new Sun Belt battlegrounds had already swum against the national tide by becoming "bluer" between 2012 and 2016. But the best recent evidence indicates that these states remain more Republican than the national average, and are currently competitive mostly because Biden is well ahead in the overall popular vote. Even so, Biden appears to have a consistent lead only in Arizona, and he still trails Trump in Texas.

If Biden's current advantage is changing the electoral map in some ways, it's working against change in others. After Trump won Ohio and Iowa by unusually wide margins in 2016, some analysts speculated that both states would lose battleground status in 2020, conceded to the GOP from the start of the campaign. Ohio and Iowa remain clearly Republican-leaning in 2020 compared to the nation as a whole, but Biden's overall lead allows him to keep both states in play (at least for now), and the Trump campaign is indeed spending money to defend them.

A scenario in which Biden maintains or expands his current margin would allow Democrats to consider deploying campaign resources into these states in pursuit of a decisive national victory and gains in downballot offices. But if the race starts to tighten, diverting attention to red-leaning states will be considerably less appealing, and Democratic dreams of "expanding the map" will need to wait for a future contest. Either way, the electoral college outcome in 2020 is still likely to pivot on the four states that Trump carried by narrow margins in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida. And there's nothing new at all about those particular states deciding who the next president will be.

Education Is Hurting Republicans in the Suburbs: New Op-Ed in the New York Times

I have a new piece over at the New York Times today explaining how Republican leaders' recent education policies are hurting them at the polls among suburban voters as they play to a conservative base that is growing older, more rural, and less well-educated. Could Republicans reclaim the education issue and win back the suburbs? It's happened before...

Yes, Some Suburbs Are Turning Blue—But Others Have Stayed Quite Red: New Op-Ed in the New York Times

The results of the 2018 elections have repeatedly been interpreted as demonstrating a weakened Republican Party in suburban America, as Donald Trump's antics are supposedly driving exasperated suburbanites into the Democratic camp. In my latest op-ed piece for the New York Times, I explain that this story indeed holds true for the nation's largest metropolitan areas. In the remainder of suburban America, however, where the electorate is whiter and more socially conservative, the GOP remains electorally dominant in the Trump era. The research paper upon which the article is drawn, "The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992–2018," also served as the basis of a recent column by Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report and is available here.

2018 Election Recap: It Ain't Over Yet!

In this age of instant hot takes and pre-written post-mortems, it's frightfully gauche for a political analyst to wait more than a minute before weighing in on a major national event. But while unrelated professional responsibilities prevented me from updating the blog until now, perhaps I can take advantage of having had a little more time to assess the evidence before adding my voice to the chorus of electoral interpreters. After all, it's been amusing to watch the conventional wisdom evolve from "the Democrats are underperforming in the House vote" to "the Democrats did fine in the House, but have to be disappointed by the Senate and governors' races" to "the Democrats engineered a big House wave, plus they also held their own in the Senate and made key gains downballot" over the 48 hours that elapsed after the first returns arrived on Tuesday night.

Besides, the election itself isn't exactly over: plenty of ballots remain to be counted in California and Arizona, while both major statewide contests in Florida are headed to recounts that have already plunged into legal challenge amid charges of fraud and maladministration. Those of us with students too young to have consciously experienced the extended postgame in 2000 will surely welcome the opportunity to guide them through a remarkable replication played out in real time over the rest of the current academic semester. And with that, some initial observations on the results of the 2018 midterm elections—or at least the results so far—with more to follow in the coming weeks:

1. The shifts in party fortunes that resulted from this week's vote are of course important, but not enough is being made of the astounding voter turnout rate—now estimated at 48.5% of eligible citizens, which would be the highest level in a midterm election since 1966 (before the national voting age was lowered to 18) and would even approach the 51.7% of Americans who turned out for the 1996 presidential election. The opposition party is typically well-mobilized in a midterm year, and Democrats certainly succeeded in stimulating exceedingly high participation by those dissatisfied with the ruling regime. But Republicans also marched to the polls to defend a president whom many had only reluctantly supported in 2016, just as pre-election indicators of interest and engagement had suggested, and succeeded in salvaging control of the Senate and a majority of state governors and legislative chambers from the national Democratic tide.

Whether they land on the pro or con side, Americans are thinking, talking, and doing politics much more since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Trump's ubiquity is, in general, a massive liability for his party—given the state of the economy, the Republican House majority would surely be intact today had virtually any other 2016 presidential candidate won the office instead—but it does have its specific uses, such as a super-charged rural vote that helps to deliver midwestern and southern Senate seats and governorships into Republican hands. From today's vantage point, the turnout rate in 2020 seems likely to hit or exceed 65 percent (it was 60 percent in 2016)—which would represent the highest proportion of eligible citizens participating in a national election in more than 100 years. It sure looks like we've found a solution for the much-lamented "vanishing voter" problem of past decades; weirdly enough, though, few people these days seem to be cheering that American civic virtue has been restored to a robust state of health.

2. Trump's alienation of previous Republican supporters among the white-collar professional suburban class (especially the female members thereof) continues to leave its marks on the electoral map. Most of the gains made by Democratic House candidates were located in the nation's largest metropolitan areas: greater New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles all produced at least one (and, in some cases, much more than one) R-to-D seat flip. (And in metro Boston and San Francisco, there simply are no remaining GOP-held seats for Democrats to capture.) But many of these shifts are either located in states that are already solidly blue (like New York and California) or are potentially neutralized by countervailing trends in smaller cities or towns elsewhere (as in Florida or Pennsylvania), limiting the consequences for state-level partisan alignments—which remain quite stable.

And while Democrats have reason to be encouraged by rising electoral strength in Sun Belt population centers from Georgia and Texas to Arizona and Nevada, their performance in the Midwest—while markedly better than its 2016 nadir—still stopped short of a full rebound to Obama-era levels. In fact, while the pre-election polling was for the most part impressively accurate, it consistently underestimated Republican strength in statewide races in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri. The Midwest will remain the nation's biggest battleground in 2020, but it's clear that Democrats can't simply depend on Trump's New York-style brashness pushing the region's voters back in their direction. (And this observation, in turn, has associated implications for a Democratic presidential nomination contest that will soon kick into high gear.)

3. While the 2018 election was largely a referendum on the president, the identity of the individual candidates still mattered as well—as confirmed by the margin of victory in the Texas Senate race. Departing, perhaps out of necessity, from its usual practice of favoring veteran elected officials in its candidate recruitment efforts, the national Democratic Party managed to assemble a very strong assortment of "not a typical politician" congressional challengers who, for the most part, proved good fits for their districts and convinced the electorate of their qualifications for office even as they lacked long public records ripe for mining by the Republican opposition.

What we don't yet know, however, is how many of these self-styled new voices will attempt to keep their distance from older generations of Democratic leaders once they take their seats in the Capitol. There's little reason to expect a collectively demanding and persistently unruly class of House freshmen à la 1995 or 2011, but the number of Democratic candidates who promised not to support Nancy Pelosi for speaker on the campaign trail this year suggests the perceived political value that lies in maintaining public independence from the existing congressional party. Pelosi herself may be safe, at least for a while—among her other advantages, there doesn't appear at present to be a clear alternative candidate for the speakership from within the Democratic ranks—but the newly-elected members will need to be given some kind of visible accommodation once they arrive in Washington, and the question of what the post-Pelosi future looks like will hang in the air even if she successfully reclaims the speaker's gavel.

A Few Political Consequences of the Democratic Surge Among College-Educated Whites

The Pew Research Center recently released an informative report on the composition of the American electorate, based on a survey of citizens whose electoral participation (or lack thereof) in 2016 was confirmed by matching their names to state voter turnout records. High-quality studies like those conducted by Pew provide more reliable information on the distribution of attributes within the voting public than the more commonly-cited (but less methodologically sound) national exit polls, and thus any discrepancies between them are usually best resolved in favor of the former.

For example, exit polls can overestimate the degree of educational attainment in the electorate. In 2016, the national exit poll found, improbably, that a full 50 percent of voters had earned at least a bachelor's degree, with just 18 percent reporting no more than a high school education. The new Pew study estimates that the true figures are the following: 37 percent with a BA degree or more, 34 percent with college experience short of a four-year degree, and 30 percent with a high school diploma or less—much closer to a rough three-way split among the no, some, and completed college categories than an even divide between four-year college graduates and non-grads.

But if the true proportion of college graduates in the voting public was smaller than the exit polls indicated, these voters also seem to have preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump much more decisively than the exit pollsters believed. The national exit poll estimated that Clinton had prevailed over Trump by 52 percent to 42 percent among all four-year college graduates, narrowly losing white college grads by a margin of 48 percent to 45 percent and carrying white female grads by 7 points (51 percent to 44 percent). According to the Pew researchers, however, Clinton outpolled Trump by a full 21 points (57 percent to 36 percent) among all college graduates, by 17 points (55 percent to 38 percent) among white grads, and by 26 points (61 percent to 35 percent) among white female grads.

The Pew figures aren't likely to be precisely correct; sampling error and other methodological limitations apply to them as well. But they surely come closer than the exit poll data to the true values within the American population. Since pre-election surveys and other forms of evidence indicate that Trump carried non-college-grad whites overwhelmingly (perhaps by as much as 40 points), the most logical way to account for the fact that Clinton outran Trump by 2.8 million popular votes nationwide is to assume that she prevailed among the college/post-grad sector of the electorate by a comfortable margin. In fact, Clinton is almost certainly the first Democratic presidential candidate in modern history to win more votes from white college graduates than the Republican opposition.

This achievement undoubtedly reflects the limits of Trump's appeal among college-educated voters more than any special devotion to Clinton. But the Democratic Party was evolving even before 2016 to become more dependent on the votes of racial minorities, young adults, and highly-educated professionals (the "Obama coalition") while relinquishing much of its previous electoral support among non-college-educated whites to the GOP. Moreover, recent opinion polls and the results of special elections indicate that the pro-Democratic shift among white college graduates evident in the 2016 contest has survived into 2017 and 2018, suggesting that the Democratic leanings of these voters will endure for at least as long as Trump is the leader of the Republican Party.

What are the implications of a newfound preference for Democrats within this formerly majority-Republican sector of the electorate? Here are a few areas of American politics that will be measurably affected by such a change:

1. Geography. Because educational attainment is not evenly distributed across geographic boundaries, the places where each party can expect to win votes will evolve along with the demographic composition of their voter coalitions. In general, we can expect the growing partisan divide between increasingly "blue" large metropolitan areas and securely "red" small towns, a trend explored in my recent book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics, to persist into the future. This will help Democratic candidates in high-education suburbs where a number of vulnerable Republican-held House seats are located, such as those actively contested this year in greater New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles. But most of these places already vote Democratic at the state level, while the erosion of Democratic support among non-college whites endangers the party's Senate prospects in states like Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. As a result, it's quite possible that the midterm elections this year will result in a majority-making Democratic "wave" of 25 seats or more in the House while simultaneously preserving, or even strengthening, Republican control of the Senate.

2. Participation. Level of educational attainment is always a powerful predictor, and often the most powerful predictor, of citizens' propensity for political engagement. Participatory activities that go beyond merely voting for president every four years—from turning out in midterm and primary elections to volunteering for campaigns, making monetary contributions, and organizing political events and groups—are all disproportionately the domain of the highly-educated. Democrats already appear to be benefiting this year from the energetic mobilization of metropolitan professionals, which has led to both a rise of political networking at the local level and a cascade of individual financial donations to Democratic candidates. In contrast, one of the biggest unanswered questions as we look forward to the 2018 midterms is whether the Republican Party will succeed in motivating the non-college-grad whites who supported Trump in heavy numbers two years ago to turn out at sufficient rates in a non-presidential election when Trump himself is not on the ballot.

3. Candidate Recruitment. Whites with college degrees are a minority of the total electorate, but they always constitute a large majority of the pool of candidates for federal and state office. A partisan shift among this population therefore influences the relative supply of strong candidates within each party's activist base. The particular antipathy to Trump evident among college-educated women in the Pew data helps to account for an unprecedented spike in the number of female candidates on the Democratic side in 2018, and the desire to send a message of opposition to Trump's behavior seems to have inspired Democratic primary voters to frequently choose these women to be standard-bearers for the party. Through the first 41 states to hold primaries so far this year, 41 percent of all Democratic House nominees this year are women, including 48 percent of all non-incumbent nominees—an astonishing increase over all previous congressional elections:

4. The Polarization of Education Policy. Education has not always been a strictly partisan or ideologically-charged issue. Past Republican presidents like George W. Bush adopted ambitious education initiatives in order to bolster their appeal among suburban moderates, while state governors and legislators of both parties have often viewed the authorization of ample K-12 and public university funding as both economically and politically advantageous. But there are signs that this bipartisan consensus is coming apart. In recent years, Republican governors in Kansas and Oklahoma have enacted ambitious tax reductions that required deep offsetting decreases to local education aid, while GOP legislators in Wisconsin have targeted state universities for budget cuts and other restrictions. In addition, conservative media sources now repeatedly direct sharp criticism at the American educational system, often describing universities as bastions of intolerant leftism and mocking college students as hopelessly coddled "snowflakes."

If highly-educated voters continue to drift toward the Democrats, a key constituency that might be expected to serve as an internal base of resistance against these policies will lose its current degree of influence within the Republican Party—which may well only further reinforce the trend of growing polarization. Trump has not made education a presidential priority, and his appointment of the controversial Betsy DeVos as secretary of education has done little to bolster his popular standing on the issue. But while Republicans may pay an electoral price in the short term due to the countermobilization of concerned parents and outraged teachers, the prospect of a perpetual partisan war over the value of American education ultimately threatens the interests of educators much more than those of politicians.

Was the Midwestern "Red Shift" More Pro-Trump or Anti-Hillary? The Answer Matters a Lot for 2018

The election analyst Nate Cohn of the New York Times published an excellent piece today arguing that the Democrats are benefiting from an electoral battleground in 2018 that is broader than was anticipated by the post-2016 conventional wisdom. In particular, he notes, Democratic candidates appear to be doing better than expected this year in heavily white, lower-education congressional districts that voted for Donald Trump. This has allowed the party to contest many more seats than it would if the scope of electoral competition were restricted to the smaller number of Republican-held well-educated suburban districts that had shifted toward Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In general, one of the most challenging aspects of analyzing events in real time is distinguishing temporary blips from more durable trends. Popular pundits and other media figures often tend to overstate the degree to which immediate events portend long-term patterns; as I noted once in another context, "There's a temptation to assume that everything new in politics is a harbinger of the future. But lots of things are dead ends: They rise, and they go away." On the other hand, we academics are often prone to the opposite bias, hanging onto familiar theories and assumptions past the point when evidence has built up that the world has indeed changed.

When it comes to the geographic polarization of American voters, there's an unmistakable decades-long trend of divergence between (pro-Democratic) metropolitan areas and (increasingly Republican) rural areas, but also an especially sharp and unprecedented increase in this gap in the 2016 presidential election—as illustrated in this summary of partisan voting in the pivotal Midwest region taken from Chapter 6 of my book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics:

The rural Midwest has been trending Republican for a long time; Bill Clinton narrowly carried it twice in the 1990s, but Barack Obama lost this vote 53 percent to 47 percent in 2008 and 57 to 43 in 2012. In 2016, Donald Trump routed Hillary Clinton here, attracting 68 percent of the two-party rural Midwestern vote—6 points better than Ronald Reagan in his 49-state landslide 1984 reelection.

If 2016 indeed represents the "new normal," than it would make sense for analysts to take a bearish view of Democratic chances in white, small-town congressional districts in the Midwest and elsewhere this year. But if 2016 was something of an aberration, and the Trump-Clinton vote does not fully reflect the relative fundamental strength of the two parties, then the map of electoral battlegrounds opens wider, and the fortunes of congressional Democrats improve accordingly.

Midterm elections are always primarily a referendum on the president, and Trump has dominated the political scene so thoroughly since he took office that this rule of thumb is likely to be especially applicable to 2018. If the remarkable Republican strength in the rural Midwest in 2016 was primarily a reflection of Trump's personal popularity, we might expect it to carry over into 2018 unless a significant share of formerly-enthusiastic Trump supporters had become disillusioned in the interim. But if the abrupt partisan shift between 2012 and 2016 visible in the figure above was largely a reflection of Hillary Clinton's personal unpopularity with rural Midwesterners—as well as a Clinton campaign that eschewed economic issues to an unprecedented degree for a modern Democrat—we shouldn't be surprised by a significant Democratic rebound in the region this November, since Clinton will be neither on the ballot nor in the White House.

Cohn's piece focuses exclusively on the House of Representatives, but the question of whether the 2016 "red shift" across the north-central section of the country is a temporary or enduring development becomes even more critical when we turn to the Senate—where Democrats are defending nine seats in Trump-carried states stretching from Pennsylvania to Montana plus two more in Minnesota (which Trump lost by less than two points). Using the 2016 presidential results as a starting point for expectations of 2018 outcomes paints a very optimistic picture for Republicans; Trump carried Indiana, Missouri, and Montana by about 20 points and won North Dakota and West Virginia by more than 35. Yet all of these states elected Democratic senators only six years ago, and all of them but North Dakota were actively contested at the presidential level as recently as 2004 or 2008. 

Many loyal Democrats will not easily accept the belief that the results in 2016 reflected a widespread popular antipathy to Hillary Clinton. And the surprising nature of Trump's victory has encouraged the view, even among his fiercest critics, that he maintains under-appreciated political strengths. But the more validity to the conclusion that Trump was a weak candidate who won a close and fluky election only because he was facing a seriously flawed opponent, the rosier the outlook becomes for Democrats this November.

Corporations and the Culture War: Op-Ed in the New York Times

I have a new op-ed piece in the New York Times explaining how the culture war has fueled geographic divisions in the American electorate, which in turn has ended up furthering the interests of wealthy individuals and corporations. The analysis draws on the research presented in my recent book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.

In Today's America, Small Voting Shifts Can Have Really Big Effects

My new book Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics demonstrates that American elections have become more geographically polarized over the past 25 years and investigates the causes and consequences of this important development. I argue that it's very difficult to understand how politics operates today without recognizing the ways in which the spatial distribution of party votes across geographic lines interacts with the rules and mechanisms of our electoral institutions to produce representative democracy in the United States.

One of the most distinctive attributes of our current political era is that the two parties are closely balanced at the national level, yet each side maintains a formidable record of electoral dominance across large regional subsections of the United States. Since the 1990s, we have experienced a series of elections in which the overall outcome has been decided by a narrow margin even as most states and congressional districts are securely and reliably either Republican or Democratic. While it was once common for most states—and nearly all large states—to be electorally up for grabs and thus actively contested by both sides in a national campaign, the number of "battleground" states has dwindled in the 21st century to a small minority of the nation:

At the same time, the election-to-election stability of these state alignments has reached historically unmatched levels. It's not just the case that most states in any given year will be safely pro-Democratic or pro-Republican while a shrinking remainder of states will be open to contestation—instead, it's increasingly the same states that are predictably "red" or "blue" in election after election,  and the same few swing states, like Ohio, Florida, and Michigan, that hold the national balance of power from one election to the next. Over the past five presidential elections, 37 states and the District of Columbia have aligned with the same party in each contest; as the graph below shows, this represents a record degree of state-level consistency. We're a long way from the presidential elections of 1956 and 1964, when all but five states in the nation voted for opposite parties in two races held just eight years apart.

Because of the winner-take-all American electoral system, these trends mean that partisan shifts among a relatively small subset of voters in a relatively small section of the nation can have a tremendous effect on outcomes if they happen to be concentrated in exactly the right place. My political science colleague Seth Masket wrote today in Vox about the changing partisan preferences among non-college-educated whites in the small-town Midwest that proved electorally pivotal in 2016, delivering the White House to Donald Trump despite his loss in the national popular vote (see my own graph below as well). Seth concludes, I think persuasively, that these shifts are not broad enough to add up to a party "realignment"—but they still proved to be decisive because they occurred in a few key states that were otherwise closely divided between the parties. Hillary Clinton ran particularly well among college-educated whites and racial minorities in 2016, which helped her outperform previous Democratic candidates in non-battleground states like California, Texas, and Arizona but didn't pay her any dividends in the unique arithmetic of the electoral college.

The Geographic Polarization of the Midwest, 1980–2016

Because the leadership of the two parties is as mutually polarized and otherwise differentiated as at any time in modern history, the consequences of these electoral outcomes for the trajectory of national politics are increasingly significant even as the outcomes themselves are more and more likely to be contingent on the attributes, and eccentricities, of the electoral system itself. Historically speaking, there wasn't much of a difference between how Americans voted in 2012 and how they voted in 2016. But there's an awfully big difference between President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump.

New Book: Red Fighting Blue

I'm very happy to announce that my new book, Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics, has just been published by Cambridge University Press in paperback, hardcover, and eBook formats.

The book explains how the emergence of significant and persistent regional differences in partisan voting patterns in both presidential and congressional elections since the 1990s has had a profound effect on party politics in the United States. The American electoral system, with its geographically-defined voting constituencies and winner-take-all rules, has greatly magnified these differences when translating the preferences of citizens into electoral college outcomes and the partisan and ideological composition of Congress. The moderate Democrats formerly elected in large numbers from what are now the "red" states and the moderate Republicans who once represented the "blue" states are both disappearing from office, leaving increasingly polarized parties and an ever-shrinking scope of electoral competition. In an age in which the two major parties are closely balanced but each increasingly dominant across large regional subsections of the nation, the specific ways in which the geographic distribution of party support interacts with the rules of the American electoral process accounts for how our politics works—or doesn't work—in the 21st century.

It Sure Looks Like the Same Old Electoral Map in 2016

The nomination of Donald Trump (and, secondarily, the performance of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries) has helped to infuse media coverage this year with a pervasive everything-is-different-now attitude that has been applied to a number of campaign attributes, practices, and phenomena. In the eyes of political analysts who have become bored with the familiar red-versus-blue pattern of the two parties' contemporary geographic constituencies, one of the more exciting aspects of the Trump candidacy was its potential capacity to redraw the modern electoral map. A few weeks ago, when Trump was within striking distance of Clinton in the national polls, pundits speculated about pro-Trump white working-class voters shifting Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Iowa from blue to red this year. More recently, Clinton's national lead and a few favorable state polls have prompted talk that Trump's political vulnerabilities might lead to Democratic victories in the traditional Republican bastions of Georgia, South Carolina, Arizona, and even Utah.

In truth, though, it seems quite unlikely that there will be much change in the traditional partisan alignment of the states At the moment, all three models on the FiveThirtyEight website—the polls-only, polls-plus, and now-cast analyses—produce an identical map in which every state is predicted to vote for the same party as in 2012 except for North Carolina, which flips from red to blue. (Because only two states, North Carolina and Indiana, voted differently in 2008 and 2012, FiveThirtyEight also forecasts a duplication of the 2008 outcome in every state but one.)

Four years ago, the Obama and Romney campaigns concentrated their resources in ten swing states deemed by both sides to be legitimately up for grabs: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. A Politico report published on Monday suggests that the Clinton campaign is currently making advertising purchases in seven states—the exact same battlegrounds as 2012, except for Colorado, Virginia, and Wisconsin—while the Trump campaign is currently advertising only in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Clinton is also buying ad time in the Omaha television market, which encompasses the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska (worth a single electoral vote) as well as sections of western Iowa.

If there is any change in the map compared to 2012, it appears more likely that the scope of the electoral battleground will shrink further rather than expand into new territory. The Clinton campaign has indicated that it is sufficiently confident of victory in Colorado and Virginia to divert resources to other, more competitive states, but it has yet to make an open incursion into any state that was deemed safe for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. Divining which states the Trump campaign views as top targets is a more difficult task for analysts, given its low rate of advertising and unorthodox candidate itinerary, but at the moment Trump is only contesting four states on the airwaves and is in no position to put any state into play that had been conceded to Obama in either of the past two elections.

We have had more than the normal share of surprises and milestones in 2016, but a realignment of the nation's political geography does not seem to be imminent. Even in an otherwise unusual presidential campaign, it will still—as the saying goes—all come down to Ohio.

Pennsylvania Is Always Purple (And Other Electoral College Observations)

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an article titled "Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go," which suggested that the electoral college was effectively tilted in favor of Hillary Clinton this year. The piece referred to a "daunting electoral map" producing a "narrow" and "precarious" path to an electoral vote majority for the Republican presidential ticket, arguing that Trump's chances of victory virtually depended on his carrying Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina—while Clinton only needed to pick off one of these four states to defeat him. Since the interaction between the political geography of the American electorate and the institutional structure of American electoral rules is a particular interest of mine, I thought I'd share a few observations based on the article, which is itself worth reading:

1. The electoral college is crucial to understanding candidate strategies, but is very unlikely to prove decisive to the outcome. The probability of a national popular vote winner failing to receive a majority of electoral votes is vanishingly small unless the popular vote margin is extremely narrow (as it was in 2000). This is because there is no significant partisan bias in the electoral college, and because individual swing states do not move independently of each other but rather collectively mirror national trends. Any analysis (like this one from the Times) arguing that Candidate X has a clear advantage in the electoral vote is thus suggesting that Candidate X is clearly ahead in the popular vote—and vice versa. Especially at this early stage of the race, it is advisable to avoid getting bogged down in trying to predict the election by gaming out various electoral college scenarios, as they will only come into play if the race is truly neck-and-neck heading into Election Day.

2. A casual reading of the Times article can leave the reader with the impression that the scope of the electoral battleground is likely to shrink significantly this year, with several states that were contested by both parties in 2012 openly conceded to one side or the other in 2016. But a more careful examination of the piece doesn't turn up any hard examples of states that fit that profile. We are not told that the Trump campaign is actually abandoning any of the states that Romney contested four years ago—only that it considers Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania pivotal to its chances and North Carolina a must-win but potentially vulnerable state. None of this should be much of a surprise; the Romney campaign was in a very similar strategic position in 2012 (except that it considered Virginia more critical than Pennsylvania). We should expect both campaigns to devote a large proportion of their resources to the first three states in any event, since they cast the most electoral votes of all the potential battlegrounds and are therefore highly likely to determine the outcome of the election. Competitive but less populous states like New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada are likely to be actively fought over by the campaigns as well, but they are much cheaper to contest and are less likely to serve as the tipping point that determines which party receives a majority in the electoral college.

3. The main development cited by the Times that works in favor of the Clinton campaign is the potential partisan evolution of Colorado and Virginia. In the past two elections, the results in both states closely matched the national popular vote. But if the Democrats could count on achieving slender victories in both states in the event of a very close race nationwide, the party would stand a decent chance of gaining an electoral vote majority even if it were to lose both Ohio and Florida. Note, however, that the article does not claim that either state is safely Democratic—only that Clinton is doing relatively well there based on recent polling. Moreover, these apparent trends would only make a difference in the event of a virtual tie in the overall popular vote. If Trump pulls ahead nationally, Colorado and Virginia will suddenly look quite unsafe for Clinton.

4. Because the article (justifiably) places particular emphasis on Pennsylvania's potentially decisive role in the 2016 election, it is worth noting that the state is often somewhat mischaracterized in electoral college analyses. Pennsylvania has not voted Republican for president since 1988, which prompts some writers to classify it as a dependable "blue" state or as part of the Democratic geographic "base." But this is not quite accurate. Pennsylvania is actually a competitive battleground state—"purple" rather than reliably blue—that usually sits one notch to the Democratic side of an even split between the parties. It has voted Democratic for the past six consecutive elections because Democratic nominees have won the national popular vote in five of those elections, while losing narrowly in the sixth (2004, when Pennsylvania voted for John Kerry by the same 2.5-point margin by which he lost the national vote to George W. Bush).

For this reason, Democrats should not count on Pennsylvania to be a safe bastion for their party—and Republicans should not view actively contesting it as achieving a bold invasion of enemy territory. Some analysts have suggested that Trump could outperform previous Republican presidential candidates in Pennsylvania due to the demographic composition of its electorate. Whether or not he manages to do so, it seems certain that the state will receive considerable attention from both parties between now and November—just as it has in every presidential election for the past 60 years.