Mailbag: Rural vs. Urban Divide

Dunno how germane this is to your current series on the US falling apart but wanted to ensure you saw it.

"No, the Divide in American Politics Is Not Rural vs. Urban, and Here's the Data to Prove It"

David S.

This article by Colin Woodard was published last November, and I have no idea why I haven't seen it till now because it's pretty darn interesting. While the defrocked political scientist in me has some misgivings about the, shall we say, lack of empirical rigor in drawing maps of regional US cultures and the "Eleven American Nations", I think this is a very healthy corrective to the overwhelming and largely data-free assertion that our current political polarization maps onto some rural/urban divide. To the degree there is a rural/urban aspect to our bimodal electorate preferences, I think, as Woodard does, that it's pure epiphenomenon. Yes, that's a $10 word, but you can look it up.