Thursday, May 23, 2019

How Your Neighbors Voted


Jackson, Mississippi is the most politically segregated city in America. In Jackson Democrats and Republicans tend to live in very different areas of the city and there are very few neighborhoods where both Republicans and Democrats live side-by-side.

FiveThirtyEight has released a new tool which allows you to see Where Democrats and Republicans Live in Your City. If you enter an address into the tool you can view an interactive map colored to reveal where your city voted Democrat and Republican. On the interactive map each precinct is colored to show the margin of support for the most popular party based on the 2016 Presidential election.

After viewing the map of your city you can scroll down the page to see how segregated your city is based on FiveThirtyEight's partisan dissimilarity index. This ranks your city based on how politically divided it is. Having looked at the results across the USA FiveThirtyEight claim that Republican enclaves in cities tend to be in low-density, less centralized neighborhoods. The cities with the highest political segregation tend to be cities with a high proportion of black residents. Looking at FiveThirtyEight's list of the cities with the highest partisan dissimilarity index score it appears that the most segregated cities are in the Deep South. As FiveThirtyEight points out the "persistence of racial segregation in American cities continues to define those cities’ politics".

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