Political polarization by county

Maps of the U.S. showing the intensity of the disdain with which Republicans view Democrats, and vice versa, by county.  My own little county is pretty mild.  Florida and South Carolina really stand out as polarized next to their neighbors.

9 comments:

Ymarsakar said...

It's sorta like how Southerners still hate Tyrant Lincoln and Atlanta butcher burner Sherman, surprisingly. It's not like they got done harm by these NOrthern blokes, but venom and revenge traditions get passed through ancestral lines.... just like Hatfield vs McCoy, Demoncrat vs Republican, Red vs Blue.

Humans are quite easy to dupe. Just takes one generation teaching their kids.

David Foster said...

Very interesting.

The term "ideological Turing test" has been applied to the ability of a person to properly state the views and arguments of his political opponents. Neither side is particularly good at this, but the Leftists are particularly awful. Sarah Hoyt (Portuguese) was just saying that Progs are frequently assuming that she is a southern rural fundamentalist.

Donna B. said...

Lots of assumptions, data mining, data manipulation, etc acknowledged in the write-up. Checking one Arkansas county I'm familiar with, it says that county is in the 80th percentile in political prejudice. However, the following maps say Democrats are somewhat less prejudiced against Republicans than Democrats elsewhere and that Republicans appear considerably less prejudiced against Democrats than Republicans elsewhere. How does that add up to lots of political prejudice?

I looked at dark green (more prejudiced) counties and found one in the 81st percentile, so that should be similar and the only difference is that the Democrats are average with the Republicans considerably less.

I don't think this study could stand much scrutiny.

Christopher B said...

Donna's observation jumped out at me, too. Checking counties in Iowa and Kentucky that I'm familiar with show a correlation between high prejudice scores with a tendency to vote for Democrats. It's possible that this isn't due to Democrats being prejudiced themselves but Republican annoyance to being in a distinct minority. Looking at some counties that I understand to be strongly Republican suggests that might be what's going on.

Grim said...

I note that Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadow's district in NC is almost completely non-prejudiced according to this chart; the only thing near it that's even somewhat blue is the nearby county that hosts Asheville, NC.

Districts I know in Georgia are more or less prejudiced as they are more or less Democratic. The 9th Congressional District, where I lived for many years, is also largely clear of prejudice according to the map.

David Foster said...

I have to note that disdain for the opposition stops being "prejudice" once the opposition reaches a certain level of evil.

If you were in Germany in the 1920s, maybe Monarchists and Social Democrats and members of some of the right-wing Veterans parties could have dealt on a non-disdainful basis with one another. Dealing with Nazis and revolutionary Communists circa 1932, not so much.

Grim said...

That is true. Prejudice just means pre-judgment. At some point, you've got enough reason to make a proper judgment.

Tom said...

What I got out of it was, "In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity. They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives, as Mutz describes in her book Hearing the Other Side.)"

Ymarsakar said...

Sarah Hoyt (Portuguese) was just saying that Progs are frequently assuming that she is a southern rural fundamentalist.

She, or at least her novels, don't give me that impression. Most likely the fans of Baen, the military sci fi community, tends to be overrepresented by Southerners because Southerners enlist in the military by out of proportion statistically. And Leftists tend to encounter Baen's readers and supporters far more than than they ever did the authors, until recently with the twitter wars and Larry Coreia leading the push war on the front of Sad Puppies (sci fi award corruptions).

Even science fiction is corrupted by Leftist wisdom, thus even NASA's space should not be assumed to be correct without extraordinary evidence.