A growing number of Americans are moving to areas where their political views are widely popular, NPR reports.
Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, found in an analysis released last week that "super landslide" counties have grown steadily in past years. The number of counties in which a presidential candidate won 80% or more of the vote has increased from 6% of all 3,143 counties in 2004 to 22% in 2020.
Former President Donald Trump's "blowouts were concentrated in white, rural counties in the Greater South, Interior West, and Great Plains," Sabato notes, "while [President Joe] Biden's were in a smattering of big cities, college towns, and smaller counties with large percentages of heavily Democratic nonwhite voters."
Bill Bishop, author of the book "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart," told NPR that "Groups of like-minded people tend to become more extreme over time in the way that they're like-minded."
He added that in the 14 years since his book’s release, Americans "are still sorting themselves in ways that end up that places are increasingly Republican or increasingly Democratic. Then you can see that playing out in Congress. There are fewer people in the middle. And so politics becomes less about solving our problems anymore. It's about cheering for our side. And so we're stuck."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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