Voting patterns reveal deep economic divide in U.S.
In the modern era of presidential politics, no candidate has ever won the popular vote by more than Hillary Clinton did this year, yet still managed to lose the electoral college. In that sense, 2016 was a historic split: Donald Trump won the presidency by as many as 74 electoral votes (depending on how Michigan ends up) while losing the nationwide vote to Clinton by 2 million votes and counting.
But there’s another divide exposed by the election, which researchers at the Brookings Institution discovered as they sifted the election returns. It has no bearing on the election outcome, but it tells us something important about the state of the country and the future of its politics.
The divide is economic, and it is massive. According to the Brookings analysis, the fewer-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of U.S. economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year.
Clinton, in other words, carried nearly two-thirds of the American economy.
With the exceptions of the Phoenix and Fort Worth areas, and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won every large-size economic county in the country.
This appears to be unprecedented, in the era of modern economic statistics, for a losing presidential candidate. The last candidate to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, Democrat Al Gore in 2000, won counties that generated about 54 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, the Brookings researchers calculated. That’s true even though Gore won more than 100 more counties in 2000 than Clinton did in 2016.
Between those elections, U.S. economic activity has grown increasingly concentrated in large, “superstar” metropolitan areas such as Silicon Valley and New York.
“This is a picture of a very polarized and increasingly concentrated economy,” said Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings metro program, “with the Democratic base aligning more to that more concentrated modern economy, but a lot of votes and anger to be had in the rest of the country.”
Source: http://triblive.com/business/headlines/11539879-74/economic-won-clinton
