Friday, May 07, 2021

How Your Neighbors Voted

America is a politically divided country. This divide is perhaps most apparent in where we live. Most Americans live in neighborhoods populated by people with very similar political views. You can find out if you live in a political bubble in the New York Times' Do You Live in a Political Bubble.

Enter your address into the NYT's interactive data visualization and you can view a dot map showing how your thousand closest neighbors voted in the the 2020 American election. Continue scrolling and the visualization will tell you the percentage of your neighbors who voted for the least popular party. 

You may or may not live in a political bubble but many American's do live in neighborhoods which are very partisan in their politics. As you continue scrolling through the NYT's Do You Live in a Political Bubble you are shown maps of the most Democratic (Bay Area) and Republican (Gillette, Wyo) areas in the country. According to the NYT about one in five Republicans, and two in five Democrats live in neighborhoods where over 75% of their neighbors share their political affiliation.

 

This isn't the first time that the New York Times has examined the political divide in the United States using data from the 2020 election. In A Close-Up Picture of Partisan Segregation, Among 180 Million Voters the NYT used a series of static maps to show where voters support the Republican and Democratic parties in major U.S. cities. These maps reveal how Democrats and Republicans live separated from each other, often in completely separate neighborhoods. The NYT analysis shows that even in neighborhoods with both Republican and Democratic supporters people still tend to live closer to people who vote the same way as them. 

1 comment:

TD said...

Where's the app so I can look up my neighbors?