American Political Geography

Political Parties and Elections 101—but no exam!

Those of a certain age will recall a 1960 movie called Exodus, about the founding of the state of Israel. Legend has it that the film, at almost 3 1/2 hours long, prompted comedian Mort Sahl to stand up at one point at its premiere and say, echoing Moses’ plea to Pharoah, “Let my people go.”

That’s the way I felt as I sat through President Trump’s 100-minute address to Congress—his de facto State of the Union address—this past week. It was a meandering speech, a combination of a laundry list of policy recommendations and a recitation of MAGA’s greatest-hits list of grievances and insults.

What struck me most, though, was the angry and sneering partisanship of much of the address. We are a long way from even platitudes about our all being Americans, and there was no attempt to appeal to any kind of unifying stance or message. A central MAGA tenet is that Democrats, and perhaps even some independents, are not truly American. They claim exclusive ownership of what it means to be American.

This is not just a sad state of affairs, but a danger to our body politic and society in general. As I’ve noted in a previous column, our divisions are inflamed by cable tv, talk radio, and the internet.

Even prior to the hyper partisanship of the MAGA era, however, there has been a fundamental social and political geographical divide in the country that goes back at least to the mid-19^th century rise of the Republican party as the main competitor to the Democratic party. Attention to that divide tells us a lot about American politics today.

With occasional exceptions, the Democratic political base since the New Deal has been the states of the northeast, the Great Lakes, and the west coast, while the Republican base—again, with occasional exceptions—has been the states of the South and the interior west. This map of the 2008 presidential results, courtesy of 270towin.com, is illustrative:

Other such maps from at least the 2000 election to 2024 are roughly similar.

What struck me when I first noticed this geographical divide some years ago, however, was that if we go back to the presidential election of 1896 (what political scientists call a critical election), we see the same divide: the states of the northeast, the Great Lakes, and the west coast on one side, and the states of the South and the interior west on the other.

The remarkable fact, though, was that in the 1896 election, not an outlier by any means, the states of the northeast, the Great Lakes, and the west coast constituted the Republican electoral base while the states of the South and the interior west constituted the Democratic electoral base. Look at this map, again courtesy of 270towin.com, of those results:

Republicans, in other words, used to be the party of urban, industrial America, while Democrats were the party of rural, agricultural America. That division has reversed. Now Republicans are the party of rural, agricultural America and Democrats are the party of urban industrial America.

Now, as this final map indicates (courtesy of Ballotpedia.com), there are significantly more Republican counties than Democratic counties:

And that difference in rural numbers helps Republicans, and especially the MAGA folks, immensely. As the Economic Innovation Group helpfully notes: “Donald Trump won 93 percent of rural counties in the 2024 election — not just the highest share of any Republican presidential candidate this century, but also an improvement on his own performance in the elections of 2016 and 2020, when 92 percent of rural counties went for him (in both elections).”

While the total number of counties in the U.S. varies somewhat by categorization method, the Census Bureau counts 3,143 counties or equivalents (e.g., parishes, independent cities). Over the last 60 years or so, Republican presidential candidates typically win 2500-2600 counties, and Democratic presidential candidates typically win 500 counties plus or minus.

In 2024, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, Kamala Harris won 451 total counties to Donald Trump’s 2,660 counties. The reason the popular vote was so close is that, per the Center for Politics, 150 of the 3100+ counties account for about half of all votes for president. That is, the large number of Republican counties are relatively sparsely populated, while the small number of Democratic counties are heavily populated.

Thus, in addition to the familiar political divides of race, religion, ethnicity, education, and income, we face this rural-urban geographical divide that tracks the longstanding divide we’ve examined. (There is now even something called the Greater Idaho Movement, a group seeking the secession of a number of rural counties in eastern Oregon in order to escape the more urban areas of the state by becoming part of Idaho.)

The central question of American politics is, can anyone speak convincingly to both sides of this divide? Does anyone even want to do so?

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