Geography was front and center in the November 2020 presidential election as states announced their election returns over the course of days and Americans eagerly awaited results from particular counties. While some counties were close, others communities were considered electorally safe and the idea of the political sorting was a regular talking point argued by various politicos who claimed that Americans have clustered into increasingly politically like-minded residential communities at the expense of the moderate middle. That is, while the national electoral results looked close, “most people lived in communities where the final vote wasn’t close at all.” The idea that American polity has sorted itself into politically homogeneous liberal or conservative communities is regularly embraced because it “feels right” at first glance to many. But the idea constantly fails to hold up to empirical scrutiny, and does so once again thanks to new data from the post-election Los Angeles Times-Reality Check Insights poll.
Specifically, the problem with the sorting idea is that misunderstands our political system and how people actually choose to live; places are far more dynamic than stories of the sort seemingly suggest. Moreover, politics and selecting candidates are dominated by an extreme group of political elites who regularly nominate ideological purists, leaving the centrist and often unengaged middle to choose between two extremes. This creates the impression of deep socio-political division, when the reality is often far less extreme.
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