Mapping How America's Metro Areas Voted

In a recent piece for CityLab, I charted the broad patterns of the 2016 presidential election results across America’s metro areas. Hillary Clinton won the largest metros, but Donald Trump carried more of them, as well as rural and micropolitan places. Overall, the 2016 election served to harden and solidify America’s enduring fault lines of class and geography, knowledge, and density.

I wanted to take a closer look at the metros that went for Trump versus Clinton. As I noted previously, election returns are not typically collated by metro area, but county-level results are available. My Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) colleagues arrayed the county-level data to the country’s 350-plus metros using data from two sources. Our main source was Dave Leip’s county-level election results. Where data was missing, we used data from Simon Rogers, data editor at Google News Lab. (Again, I note that while there are still some vote tallies yet to be certified, the overall shares of the vote at the metro level are unlikely to change much at this point).