Abstract
American politics have become increasingly polarized in recent decades, not only ideologically but also geographically. The extent of that geographical polarization is explored at the county and SMSA scales for the presidential elections held between 1992 and 2016 and also, at the much finer, precinct, scale for the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections. The patterns that emerge show that much of non-metropolitan USA has becoming increasingly dominated by Republican party candidates, whereas the large metropolitan central cities remain dominated by the Democrats. Within those metropolitan areas, change, especially at the 2016 contest, was largely confined to their suburban districts.
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Notes
The term ‘purple places’ can be traced back to Vanderbei’s map of the 2000 US presidential election, devised as a student exercise: his maps of that and subsequent elections can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2016/. It was taken up by US News and World Report in 2004: http://backissues.com/issue/US-News-and-World-Report-October-18-2004.
See, for example, Mark Wilson (2012: https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671268/infographic-forget-red-and-blue-the-most-accurate-map-of-us-voters-is-purple), and John Sides (2013: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/12/most-americans-live-in-purple-america-not-red-or-blue-america/?utm_term=.b6a1b1b913cb).
We are grateful are grateful to Clark Archer, Fred Shelley and Bob Watrell for allowing us to use the county-scale data set they compiled for presidential elections between 1992 and 2016 in this research (see Johnston et al. 2016).
These maps were created using a carefully-constructed data set by Clark Archer, Fred Shelley and Bob Watrell for presidential elections between 1992 and 2016 in this research; we are grateful to them for sharing it with us.
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Johnston, R., Manley, D., Jones, K. et al. The geographical polarization of the American electorate: a country of increasing electoral landslides?. GeoJournal 85, 187–204 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9955-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9955-3