~ As is his wont [modernize to "As is his custom"? -- ȐD], Thomas Edsall brings a wealth of citations to his argument that, in the mapping from county population density[1] to partisan lean, the slope has been smoothing out. (For readers unfamiliar with US partisanship, I've drawn three ASCII art graphs to suggest some historical context.)
~ [1]: Or, perhaps equally well, the X axis can show a county's distance from the nearest metropolitan core, i.e. on a scale from periphery to centrality. Some of the studies Edsall cites use such a model, but others use pure population density.
~
Fig. 1 - A long time ago: Fig. 2 - Not too long ago: Fig. 3 - Now:
lean | lean | lean |
Rep. | .... Rep. | Rep. |.....
| .. .. | ....... | ...
| ... .. |..... ... | ....
|... .. | .. | ...
lean | .. lean | ... lean | .....
Dem. |____________________ Dem. |____________________ Dem. |____________________
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
sparsely densely sparsely densely sparsely densely
populated populated populated populated populated populated
~ Edsall cites, among others:
"Rural America Lost Population Over the Past Decade for the First Time in History"
date: 2022-02-22 publisher: Carsey School of Public Policy, University of New Hampshire
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"The Increase in Partisan Segregation in the United States"
draft / by Jacob R. Brown et al.
date: January 17, 2022 authors: Jacob R. Brown, Enrico Cantoni, Ryan D. Enos, Vincent Pons and Emilie Sartre version: first draft
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"The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker"
U. of Chicago Press / by Katherine J. Cramer (2016)
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"Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics"
Cambridge U. Press / by David A. Hopkins (2017)
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"The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018 (Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, August 29, 2019)"
paper / by David A. Hopkins (2019)
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"Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America's Urban-Rural Divide (Political Research Quarterly 2022, Vol. 0(0) 1-16)"
reprint / by Nicholas Jacobs and B. Kal Munis
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"Symbolic Versus Material Concerns of Rural Consciousness in the United States (Political Geography, Volume 96, June 2022, 102658)"
reprint / by Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley
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"What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities"
Pew Research Center / by Kim Parker et al.
date: 2018-05-22 authors: Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D'vera Cohn and Ruth Igielnik
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"Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America"
Beacon Press / by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas (2010)
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~ Edsall also quotes from his email correspondence with Justin Gest at George Mason University.
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1792: First meeting of the