What ever you think about Trump, it’s fact that he was elected in 2016, winning the electoral college while loosing the national popular vote. A county-by-county map overlay sheds a little bit more light on the subject, showing plainly that he won on a county-level by a land-slide, while performing poorly in all the population centers.
What stands out to me is that except for a few areas (South-West along the border, and a blue belt that stretches from MS up through North Carolina), the over-whelming majority of Democratic support comes from population centers.
Population centers have a tendency to vote Democratic, why?
It is somewhat intriguing to me that we also see this in other countries as well. In the recent UK election, Boris Johnson (Conservative Party) takes the countryside, while the Socialists take the population centers, why? What is it with cities that makes socialism so attractive?
Taking the strong ideology differences that have appeared in the parties in both of these elections, it seems possible to draw a clear correlation between country folks and conservatism as well as city folks and post liberalism/socialism.
This begs the question, is it that population centers intrinsically (perhaps unconsciously and unintentionally) influence people towards left-leaning policies? Or is it that left-leaning policies influence people towards population centers? That is, an extrinsic influence.
I don’t intend to delve into the specifics of each as a separate topic at this point, but suspect the answer ultimately lies in a mix of both the intrinsic (related to the nature of a city as we currently know them) and extrinsic (external influences and ideologies that influence people who then choose to live in cities).
(US & UK map overlays from Wikipedia.)
