#US ELECTORAL MAP BY POPULATION DENSITY FULL#

“Driving that shift in the exurbs may be the same factor driving the shift toward the Democrats in urban suburbs – high numbers of bachelor’s degrees,” wrote Chinni in an analysis of the 2020 election. Even though the exurbs still skewed Republican overall, they turned blue at a far higher rate than most other kinds of places. What is most evident is the dramatic shift in the exurbs, areas further from urban centers with high levels of education where a large chunk of the voting-age population lives-11%, according to the American Communities Project. Biden surely benefitted from this year’s record turnout. And as Sellers showed back then, turnout favors the Democrats. These economically challenged close-in suburbs were big factors in Obama’s wins and even bigger factors in Trump’s surprise 2016 victory. He called attention to more economically distressed suburbs, typically located closer in toward urban centers, which play an outsize role every four years. Sellers identified a particular type of suburb as key to presidential elections. Nearly a decade ago, University of Southern California political scientist Jeffrey M. They have grown increasingly diverse by race, ethnicity and socio-economic class. The suburbs are not monolithic and don’t conform to the largely white middle-class ideal of the 1950s and 1960s. And this is likely why Trump put attracting suburban voters at the center of his own failed electoral strategy.īut Trump was relying on outdated stereotypes about the suburbs, which have changed markedly in their demographics since Phillips’ diagnosis. Back in the early 1970s, political strategist Kevin Phillips famously identified the “ silent majority” of conservative-leaning suburban voters.

Suburbia has long been the key battleground for the presidency. The central political role of the suburbs is not new.

#US ELECTORAL MAP BY POPULATION DENSITY FULL#

7 percentage points (although only about 71% of these counties have reported full results as of publication). Biden also gained slightly in large urban centers that have long been Democratic strongholds, with the margin of victory increasing slightly by. In mid-size cities, the Democratic share of voters grew from 44.4% to 48.1%. Several other types of communities-mid-size cities, small towns and very small towns-also remained majority Republican, but Democrats gained ground in each. Rural areas remained reliably red, and Trump picked up more ground there (1 percentage point) versus 2016. The change was most significant in the suburbs, where the margin shifted in favor of Democrats by 4.3 percentage points. In all but rural counties, these margins shifted in favor of Democrats in 2020. It shows how the margins between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates changed between 20 in each type of county. The chart below divides counties according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics classification scheme, which breaks out six different types of urban, suburban and rural areas. And not just close-in highly urbanized suburbs in close proximity to the urban center, but some further out suburbs, even exurbs. The dominant fissure was not between urban and rural voters but between suburban and rural voters. More affluent and college-educated professionals and knowledge workers have clustered in larger cities, as many working-class people moved outward to the suburbs and rural America, widening the chasm between blue cities and red outlying areas.īut in the 2020 presidential election, it was the suburbs that were the inflection point, carrying the Democrats to victory. Geography’s defining role in how Americans vote has increased over the past decade or so, as people have sorted themselves by income, education and ideological outlook.

But while most of America was anxiously watching screens and needles to see which hue the handful of crucial swing states would turn, the nation’s future was ultimately being decided at a far more granular scale-in the suburbs. America’s political map is famously divided into shades of red and blue.

Us electoral map by population density