Mapping Partisan Sorting in America

Partisanship in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and New York (New York Times)
The New York Times

The New York Times maps partisan sorting in America—the tendency for voters to self-select into areas where people think and vote the same way they do—down to the neighbourhood level.

The maps above—and throughout this article—show their estimates of partisanship down to the individual voter, colored by the researchers’ best guess based on public data like demographic information, voter registration and whether voters participated in party primaries.

We can’t know how any individual actually voted. But these maps show how Democrats and Republicans can live in very different places, even within the same city, in ways that go beyond the urban-suburban-rural patterns visible in aggregated election results.

It goes beyond racial, urban vs. suburban vs. rural and house vs. apartment splits, to the point where researchers are wondering whether Americans are “paying attention to the politics of their neighbors” when they decide where to live. This has implications not only in terms of electoral targeting (e.g. gerrymandering, voter suppression), but in terms of basic social cohesion.

The maps are based on research by Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos published earlier this month in Nature Human Behavior.

Previously: Red and Blue vs. Gray and Green.