'Blue Wave' not a reality outside largest cities - Entrepreneur Generations

With the midterm elections approaching, pundits and news stories keep talking about a "Blue Wave": a surge in votes for Democratic candidates as a response to President Trump and Republican policies. In this narrative, rural residents triggered Republican control of Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2016. "This is at best a misleading and incomplete account," Bill Bishop and Tim Marema report for The Daily Yonder. "And it also misses a more important trend in the nation’s politics since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008: the increasing concentration of Democratic voters into the largest metropolitan areas."

Democrats have been losing voters in rural, suburban and ex-urban areas since 1980, but the trend is accelerating. "Democrats don’t have a rural problem. They’ve got an everywhere-but-the-nation’s-largest-cities problem," Bishop and Marema report.

To illustrate the extent of the issue, Bishop and Marema broke down communities into six categories: Major Metro Core (pop. 1 million or more), Major Metro Suburbs (the suburban counties of major metropolitan areas), Medium Metro Core (pop. 250,000 to 999,999), Medium Metro Suburbs (the suburban counties of medium-sized metropolitan areas), Small Metro (pop. 50,000 to 249,999), and Nonmetro/Rural (all counties not located in a metropolitan statistical area). On the charts below, the red and blue lines denote congressional races, while the columns denote presidential races:

Daily Yonder map; click the image to enlarge it.

Winning in the big cities means a lot of votes for Democrats: nearly 55 percent of total votes in 2016 House races came from cities with more than 1 million residents, while rural votes only account for 15 percent of voters. But Bishop and Marema note that rural voters didn't heavily swing Republican until 2010, two years after Democrats won the White House and took control of Congress.

"For a 'blue wave' to crash into Washington this election season, Democrats will have to do more than activate the major metropolitan base," Bishop and Marema write. "That tactic was enough to get Obama re-elected in 2012 but not enough to fend off Donald Trump in 2016. And for congressional races, it hasn’t been enough to win a House majority since 2008."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2KQe5ww 'Blue Wave' not a reality outside largest cities - Entrepreneur Generations

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