OPINION

Do You Live in a Democrat

Political Bubble?
Republican
By Gus Wezerek, RyanIndependent
D. Enos and
Jacob Brown
May 3, 2021

How politically diverse is your neighborhood?

600 North 2nd Street, Fort Dodg…

Enter your address to see the political party

of the thousand voters closest to you.

Many of your neighbors — 63 percent — are

Republicans. You don't quite live in a bubble,
but we wouldn't say your neighbors are
politically diverse, either.

One in three Americans are almost

completely isolated from the opposite party.

There’s a zip code 11 miles away from you

where only 25 percent of the average
Republican's neighbors are Democrats.

The film critic Pauline Kael once said that

she lived in a “rather special world” because
she only knew one person who voted for
Richard Nixon.

People in the Bay Area, the country’s most

Democratic metropolitan enclave, may have
felt similarly after Donald Trump won in
2016.

Residents of Gillette, Wyo., where about nine

out of 10 voters are Republicans, might have
been equally shocked by President Biden’s
victory.

Republicans and Democrats are increasingly

alienated from each other, rhetorically and
geographically.

How did we end up with such a segregated

political landscape?

More than half of Republicans believe

that last year’s election was stolen from
Donald Trump. Rather than reject claims
of election fraud, Republican lawmakers
have used the premise that the election
was stolen to justify restrictions on
voting.

Mr. Trump most likely deserves much of

the blame for the widespread belief
among Republicans that the election was
illegitimate. But there’s another reason
so many Republicans might not believe
that Joe Biden won: They don’t live near
people who voted for him.

Surveys have shown that Americans’

animosity toward the opposing political
party is higher than it has been in
decades. At the same time, we’ve found
that geographic political segregation has
increased over the past 10 years. Could
the two trends be connected?

“It’s a lot easier to demonize people on

the other end of the political spectrum if
you don’t personally know many of
them,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a
senior fellow at the Century Foundation.
“That’s not a healthy situation for the
country.”

Earlier this year, we published a study

that measured how politically isolated
Democrats and Republicans have
become. Starting with a dataset
containing the address of nearly every
registered voter in the United States, we
estimated each voter’s political affiliation
based on which party the voter
registered with, demographics and
election results. We used that data to
create the maps here.

We measured political isolation by

looking at each voter’s thousand closest
neighbors. For about one in five
Republicans, and two in five Democrats,
less than a quarter of their neighbors
belong to the opposite political party.

Each represents one out of 100 Democrats

0 25 50 75 100% of neighbors
are Republicans

38% of Democrats live in a bubble

Each represents one out of 100 Republicans

0 25 50 75 100% of neighbors
are Democrats

19% of Republicans live in a bubble

This year’s violence at the Capitol is a

frightening harbinger of the future of
American democracy if our political
parties grow more estranged. Is it too
late to pop our political bubbles?

In many places, political segregation

overlaps with racial segregation. People
of color, who tend to identify as
Democrats, live in densely populated
urban communities. Republicans, who
are mostly white, are spread out across
exurbs and rural areas.

Our data reveals the racial and political

segregation that exists even within cities.
In Mobile, Ala., for example, Black
Democrats live along the water, while
white Republicans are bunched up
farther inland. This division has existed
for more than a century, in part because
of the government’s racist housing
policies.

White
White
Republicans
Republicans Mobile
Mobile

Many
Many Black
Black
neighborhoods
neighborhoods
were deemed
were deemed
“hazardous”by
“hazardous” by
the government
the government
in 1937.
in 1937.

White
Republicans

Mobile Many Black

neighborhoods
were deemed
In 1937, the federal Home Owners’ Loan “hazardous” by
the government
Corporation made a map of Mobile for the in 1937.

real estate industry to use when

assessing an area’s risk level. Across the
board, Mobile’s Black neighborhoods
were shaded in red and rated as
“hazardous,” making it more difficult for
residents to get loans or build enough
wealth through homeownership to move
elsewhere.

Today, redlining lives on under the guise

of single-family zoning laws. By banning
multifamily housing units, many
communities have essentially locked out
people of color who have less wealth and
can’t afford single-family homes’ higher
down payments.

But even if racial segregation

disappeared overnight, there’s evidence
to suggest that people would still be
sorted into red or blue communities.

Take Cedar Grove, N.J., and its neighbor

to the east, Upper Montclair. About four
out of five residents in both areas identify
as white.

Politically, though, the two New Jersey

suburbs are worlds apart. Last year,
Donald Trump won Cedar Grove by a
margin of seven percentage points. In
Montclair, President Biden won by 78
percentage points.

Cedar Grove
Cedar Grove

Upper
Upper
Montclair
Montclair

Montclair
Montclair

Cedar Grove Upper

Montclair
While Cedar Grove and Upper Montclair
are predominantly white, they differ in
key ways that most likely correlate with
their politics. The median household
Montclair
income in Upper Montclair is almost
twice that of Cedar Grove’s. There’s a
cultural difference as well, as Montclair is
home to a sizable contingent of
journalists who work in Manhattan.

“People aren’t choosing to live near

neighbors who share their party
affiliation” said Alan Abramowitz, a
professor of political science at Emory
University. “They’re segregating based
on lifestyle choices.”

The alignment of lifestyle and politics

reflects the sorting of Democrats and
Republicans by income and education, in
addition to race. While members of both
parties want to live in neighborhoods
with good schools and low crime, they
disagree about the importance of certain
religious and cultural amenities.

Democrats, surveys have shown, are

more likely than Republicans to prioritize
walkable neighborhoods with good public
transit. Republicans, on the other hand,
prize neighborhoods with more
Christians and larger houses.

If Mr. Biden is interested in a return to

comity between Democrats and
Republicans, he stands little chance of
undoing the decades-in-the-making
constellation of who we vote for and
whether we want to live near a Whole
Foods or Cracker Barrel.

But the president can make it easier for

people of color to move to the suburbs, in
part by reforming discriminatory zoning
policies. And he has good reason to make
integration a priority: Democrats’
geographic isolation has cost the party
political power.

Because Democrats are clumped

together in cities, Republicans have been
able to redraw congressional district
boundaries so that, in some states, the
share of House seats that Democrats
control is much smaller than Democrats’
overall share of votes.

Take Ohio, where Mr. Biden won 45

percent of the vote but Democrats only
control four of the state’s 16 congressional
seats. The state’s 11th Congressional
District, a Democratic stronghold that
includes much of Cleveland, is a case
study in how political segregation has led
to disproportionate representation.

During the 2011 redistricting process,

Republicans extended the district’s
boundaries to include the city of Akron,
another Democratic bastion.

LAKE ERIE

Cleveland
Cleveland

Ohio’s
Ohio’s 11th
11th district
district

Cleveland Akron
Akron

Ohio’s 11th district

Ohio’s 11th district
Republicans were able to lasso most of
northeastern Ohio’s Democratic voters
into a single district because those voters
were clustered together in cities. By
doing so, RepublicansAkron removed
Democratic voters from nearby districts,
making it more likely that their own
party would win those seats.

As states begin the redistricting process

this year, Democratic leaders will be
focused on striking down unfair
boundaries drawn by Republican
legislatures. Hours after the Census
Bureau released state apportionment
numbers last week, a Democratic
redistricting group filed lawsuits to throw
out maps in Louisiana, Minnesota and
Pennsylvania.

But for a more durable solution,

President Biden should dismantle zoning
laws that have kept Democrats and
Republicans apart in the first place.

Middle-income Democrats who can’t

afford a single-family home should still be
able to raise their children in a duplex
with a front yard. And young, lower-
income Republicans shouldn’t be priced
out of the cultural amenities that city life
provides.

By making it easier for Democrats and

Republicans to live side by side,
President Biden might also restore some
of our trust in one another. Our
democracy only stands to benefit.

Correction: An earlier version of this

article misstated the location of Ohio's
11th Congressional District. It is in
northeastern Ohio, not northwestern Ohio.
An earlier version of an interactive
element with this article misstated a voter
registration requirement in some states.
When registering to vote, residents of
some states may provide a political party
affiliation; they are not required to
provide an affiliation. Also, Maryland
residents who register to vote may provide
a party affiliation.

Read more on political and racial

segregation

The ‘New Redlining’ Is

Deciding Who Lives in Your
Neighborhood

Your Home’s Value Is Based on

Racism

A Close-Up Picture of Partisan

Segregation, Among 180
Million Voters

Gus Wezerek is a writer and graphics editor for

Opinion. Ryan D. Enos is a professor at Harvard
University who studies politics, geography and
psychology. Jacob Brown is a graduate student at
Harvard University.

Methodology: To make this interactive, we used a

dataset containing the addresses and party
identifications of 180 million registered voters in
2018. The data comes from L2, a company that
gathers and sells publicly available voter registration
records.

For voters who didn’t explicitly register as Democrats

or Republicans, we estimated their partisan
affiliation based on the ideological lean of the party
they did register with and their voting history in
primaries. In the absence of that information, we
assigned parties based on voters’ demographics and
precinct-level election results.

Voters who register with one of the major parties still

sometimes vote for the opposing party's candidates
in general elections. In Kentucky, for instance, it's
likely that between a third and a fifth of registered
Democrats voted for Donald Trump in 2016. To
validate our partisanship estimates, we asked
10,000 voters which party they belonged to. Our
estimates matched their responses 77 percent of
the time.

Our analysis treats next-door neighbors the same as

it does those who live at the outer edges of voters’
networks. When we took distance into account, each
party’s isolation was even more pronounced.

Additional sources: Boundaries for redlined areas in

Mobile, Ala., courtesy of Robert K. Nelson, LaDale
Winling, Richard Marciano and Nathan Connolly at
Mapping Inequality. Boundaries for Ohio’s 11th
Congressional District courtesy of Jeffrey B. Lewis,
Brandon DeVine, Lincoln Pitcher and Kenneth C.
Martis. Maps created with Mapbox.

Additional contributions by Yaryna Serkez and Aaron

Krolik.

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