The Urban-Rural Divide is More Complex Than You Might Think
By: Adel Wu
Tags: Data Visualization, Python3, Election 2020, Pandas, Politics

The Urban-Rural Divide is More Complex Than You Might Think

This is a final Data Story Project for COMM318: Stories From Data taught by Dr. Matt O’Donnell.

On November 3rd 2020, I was anxiously sitting at the edge of my seat, chewing my nails while blasting the livestream of the voting results on YouTube. I had piles of work to do but my roommate and I resorted to baking brownies and doing crafts, attempting to ease our mind over the narrow margins between blue and red.

As a news analyzer pulled up each state and their different county percentage breakdowns, I had begun to notice a slight pattern — each state had small specks of pure blue, slowly bleeding out into a vast red sea. Each visualization had the major urban cities superimposed on the map, and they happen to sit right on top of those blue specks: a county level inspection of this year’s election map reveals densely populated liberal epicenters surrounded by large swaths of sparsely-inhabited conservatism.

A GeoJSON visualization I created of the voting turnout for Pennsylvania, a close swing state, for the 2020 Presidential Election. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, and Erie are the top 4 most inhabited cities in Pennsylvania. Biden ended up beating out Trump with 1.2% more votes. Source: Kaggle & PennShare OpenData

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won just 15 percent of the land area of the U.S., but she led Donald Trump by more than 2 million popular votes.

National Level

Further research led me to the concept coined “The Urban-Rural Divide,” which is the exact phenomenon I saw displayed — this clear realization was slightly jolting yet so obvious at the same time. As someone who has never really dug deep into politics, I wanted to further prove this to myself through analysis of data! I found a vast amount of survey data from a new UChicago Harris/AP-NORC Poll conducted in January 2019. The poll asked over 1,010 adults aged 18 and older nationwide their opinions on political topics ranging from the economy to traits they’d like in a candidate, and also recorded their demographics, notably if they lived in an urban, suburban, or rural area.

A majority of urban residents identify as Democrats, while a majority of rural residents identify as Republicans. Graph by Adel Wu. Source: AP-NORC

The plot to the left shows an association between Residential type and political party leaning: The percentage of Democrats drops significantly as you go from urban to rural, while the percentage of Republicans follow the opposite pattern. Studies have also shown that suburbanites with urban-living experience are significantly more liberal in their political attitudes than those who have lived their whole lives in either suburban or rural communities.

It was clear from the map that counties containing major urban cities were very blue, but was it the case that the further you were from one, the more likely republican you were? What happens in between?

Philadelphia

In order to investigate this question, I wanted to focus back in on the state of Pennsylvania, as it was a swing state and is also the state I go to school in. I wanted to find a possible association between the distance between each county and urban city, and how many people vote Democratic in that county. The definition of an urban city can vary, so I decided to pick the Top 5 most populous cities in PA, which were Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Erie, and Reading. I also defined a county’s “location” to be the center of the area geometrically, which is called the centroid.

I took the centroids of all 65 counties in Pennsylvania, and plotted their smallest distance from the 5 chosen cities against the percentage of Democratic voters in their county. With a line of best fit (which best expresses the relationship between those points), a smooth downward sloping pattern appears:

The graph shows a negatively sloped relationship between the two, meaning that the further away you get from a large city, the less likely you are a Democratic voter. Graph by Adel Wu. Source: AP-NORC & Wikipedia

Looking closer at two of the most rightmost points on this plot, they represent Fulton and Potter county. When you place them on the map, the gradient becomes more clear visually as you see the colors change as you get closer to Pittsburgh and Erie.