The 2016 Election In One Map

I was reading Ronald Brownstein's How Carbon Emissions Explain Trump's Win, which was just published in The Atlantic. Let's get right to it.

Trump’s polarizing appeal has deepened the existing geographic and demographic fault lines in American politics into a chasm so imposing it could mark the border between two countries.

On one side, Hillary Clinton routed Trump in the racially and culturally diverse metropolitan centers that are helping forge a globalized, information-based, and low-carbon economy.

On the other, Trump posted crushing margins in the places that feel eclipsed, or threatened, by all of those trends.

Later, Ronald refers to this Hillary's utopia—a globalized, information-based, and low-carbon economy—as the "post-industrial" economy.  Needless to say, such an economy does not exist and can not exist at a global scale.

We need to change one word in that sentence describing the Trump dystopia.

On the other, Trump posted crushing margins in the places that feel were eclipsed, or threatened, by all of those trends.

Much better. What a difference a single word can make.

I am going to ignore Brownstein's GDP/emissions decoupling nonsense, which is based on decoupling nonsense from Brookings.

Instead, let's focus Hillary's utopia versus Trump's dystopia. Check out this map, which comes from a Washington Post column with the misleading title Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in this election. That column is based on another Brookings report.

The divide is economic, and it is massive.

According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America'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.

Here's how the researchers, at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, visualized that. You can see immediately what's going on: With the exceptions of the Phoenix and Fort Worth areas, and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won every large-sized economic county in the country.

[See the WaPo article to see another county graphic].

A sea of red with specks of blue, many of which are on the coasts

That map is self-explanatory. Economic elites, income inequality, etc.

And then WaPo columnist Jim Tankersley writes, without a link or supporting evidence of any kind—

But it's not the case that the counties Clinton won have grown richer at the expense of the rest of the country — they represent about the same share of the economy today as they did in 2000.

I see. Nobody in New York or Washington, D.C. or Silicon Valley has grown richer at the expense of the rest of the country. And pigs can fly.

Well, this is the Washington Post. All these sources, including The Atlantic and Brookings, have so much elite bias that their interpretation of that map or anything else is entirely worthless.

Have a nice weekend.

Comments

[M. Frank]

2000. That seminal year *after* the tech bubble so successfully transferred wealth upwards and coastwards. And 20 years *after* the comprehensive and systematic hollowing out of the industrial base in the Midwest. And 15 years *after* the beginning of the breathtaking borrowing binge that resulted in a federal government so overfed and bloated that a few trillion can get misallocated in the war branch and not noticed for years.

OK. Huh. Yeah. 2000 is a great year for comparison when supporting motivated reasoning. Hats off to the Washington Post.