What the explosive growth of ‘blowout counties’ means for U.S. politics
Look at a few national election results and it’s easy to think of the United States as a 50/50 nation overall, split down the middle between Republican red and Democratic blue. But that’s not the reality in vast and growing swaths of the country, where political competitiveness at the local level is being replaced by landslide loyalty to a single party.
Across the country, 20-point margins in counties Republicans were winning at the turn of the century have turned into 50-point margins or more in recent years. Meanwhile, the number of counties that flipped from one party to the other in each presidential election has shrunk.
Data compiled by the NBC News Political Unit has shown the demographic trends that have organized our current political coalitions. But the geographical trends also help show how much of the reorganization has clustered along community lines over the last quarter-century. If some people talk like they’ve never had political conversations with people who disagree with them, it could be because that’s more possible than ever before in today’s politically clustered United States.