How Democrats Conquered the City
It might be the most ironclad law of politics in 2019. Democrats win cities—period.
They win in big cities, like New York, and small cities, like Ames, Iowa; in old cities, like Boston, and new cities, like Las Vegas. They win in midwestern manufacturing cores and coastal tech hubs, in dense cities connected by subway and in sprawling metros held together by car and tar. If you Google-image-search a map of county-by-county U.S. election results, what you will see is a red nation dotted with archipelagos of urban blue.
This fact may not seem worthy of inquiry, since the Democratic Party is the nation’s more progressive party, and—dating back to the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages—populous and diverse places have typically been more open to new ideas in science and politics. One hundred years ago, however, Democrats represented a wildly different constituency of rural white southerners and populist western farmers. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson’s support in America’s rural counties was, if anything, slightly higher than his support in urban counties.
So how did Democrats and
