A Close-Up Picture of Partisan Segregation, Among 180 Million Voters

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Emily Badger
@emilymbadger
We’re all familiar with the urban-rural political divide.

But when we zoom in much, much closer, it appears within metros, within cities, even within neighborhoods, Democrats and Republicans live apart from each other to a degree that’s not random:

A Close-Up Picture of Partisan Segregation, Among 180 Million Voters
Democrats and Republicans increasingly live apart, all the way down to the neighborhood level.
nytimes.com
7:01 AM · Mar 17, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/17/upshot/partisan-segregation-maps.html

The broad outlines of America’s partisan divides are visible on any national map. Republicans typically dominate in most Southern and Plains states, and Democrats in Northeastern and West Coast ones. Democrats cluster in urban America, Republicans in more rural places.

But keep zooming in — say, to the level of individual addresses for 180 million registered voters — and this pattern keeps repeating itself: within metro areas, within counties and cities, even within parts of the same city.

Democrats and Republicans live apart from each other, down to the neighborhood, to a degree that raises provocative questions about how closely lifestyle preferences have become aligned with politics and how even neighbors may influence one another.

As new research has found, it’s not just that many voters live in neighborhoods with few members of the opposite party; it’s that nearly all American voters live in communities where they are less likely to encounter people with opposing politics than we’d expect. That means, for example, that in a neighborhood where Democrats make up 60 percent of the voters, only 50 percent of a Republican’s nearest neighbors might be Democrats.

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