Republican candidates for the U.S. House won in 82 percent of counties in last fall’s general election “and Democrats did best in the most densely populated counties,” says the Daily Yonder. “The House vote in November showed an American electorate divided geographically and clustered into places that were overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican.” The Yonder says Democratic counties averaged 856 people per square mile and Republican counties averaged 127 people. Two-thirds of Democratic and Republican voters reside in counties where one party had a victory margin of more than 20 points in House races – landslide majorities.
“What we see in this set of numbers is how Democrats and Republicans live in two different worlds based on population density,” writes the Yonder’s Bill Bishop. “But the pattern does not hold in rural America…there was essentially no difference in density between Republican and Democratic counties in rural America.” All the same, Bishop says, “the geographic story of politics in this country isn’t rural vs urban, it’s density. The closer people live together, the more likely that place is to being Democratic.” The Yonder included an interactive map with detailed data on each county.