The most partisan members of the Republican and Democratic parties — the people who vote in primary elections — cluster in different parts of the country. Democrats live in cities and Republicans in rural areas, says the Daily Yonder. Roughly 15 percent of Americans live in rural counties, which produced 18.5 percent of the votes in GOP primaries and 10.8 percent of the Democratic vote in a year when the parties turned out fairly equal numbers of votes nationwide.
The margins were inverted in metropolitan areas of one million people or more. Democrats polled 18.9 million votes in the big cities, compared to 14.6 million GOP votes. In rural areas, there were 5.7 million GOP votes versus 3.3 million Democratic ballots. “We’ve seen this pattern before,” says the Yonder. In 2014 congressional races, Democrats cast the majority of votes in the big urban areas and trailed Republicans in all the other population categories.
The alignment of Democrats in big cities and Republicans in the suburbs and rural areas may be self-perpetuating, said the New York Times’ Upshot column. Republicans have been successful in using urban areas as a foil when campaigning in rural districts. “The average congressional district held by Republicans today has a quarter of the population density it did in 1950,” said the Upshot.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did best in cities on her way to the Democratic presidential nomination, said the Yonder. The GOP nominee, Donald Trump, got nearly the same share of votes in cities as he did in rural areas.