America's 'Big Sort' Is Only Getting Bigger

Setting the nuttiness of Donald Trump and his candidacy aside, the 2016 presidential campaign serves as a fitting reminder of America’s deepening partisan divide. Americans have not only grown more ideologically polarized over the past couple of decades, Republicans and Democrats are drawn to very different kind of places. Back in 2004, Bill Bishop dubbed the self-segregation of Americans into like-minded communities, “The Big Sort.” (My next post for CityLab will dig into how these differences are shaping the 2016 election results. So stay tuned!)

A recent study by Ron Johnston, David Manley, and Kelvyn Jones in Annals of American Association of Geographers takes a deep dive into the big sort in American politics, examining the past six presidential elections, from 1992 to 2012, spanning Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. While most research examines America’s partisan divide across states—Andrew Gelman’s book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State being perhaps the best example—this study does so across three different geographic levels or scales: nine broad Census divisions or regions, 50 states, and more than 3,000 counties.