Even before any election happens, it’s pretty easy to predict where the demographic fault lines will be: whites tend to vote more Republican than non-whites. Women tend to vote more Democratic than men. This year, it became clear that there was a growing gap between white voters with college degrees, who tend to vote more Democratic, and those without degrees, who vote more Republican.
Here’s another divide that started to get more attention this election: the rural-urban gap. Rural voters vote more Republican, while urban voters vote more Democratic, and that divide grew this year from where it was in 2012 and 2008. It’s a nuanced divide, too; strikingly, as counties get progressively more rural, they more or less steadily grow more Republican. And it’s possible that living in a rural area caused people to vote more Republican this election.
Exit polls show that the rural-urban divide grew from 2008 to 2012, and again this election. What’s particularly interesting is that the rural vote seems to have moved more than the urban or suburban votes.
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