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Contents
The Public Mind

    Type to search. Planned chapters match by title only.

    Volume 3: The political map

    Part X

    The nationalized map

    County swings collapsed onto one national number, and the county vote now follows composition.

    3 written, 2 planned

    The first two volumes described people: how closely party, ideological label and issue positions line up in American surveys, and how the content of the left-right label differs by country. Volume three moves to places, with full counts of votes in counties and precincts and records of campaign gifts. The apparent contradiction it examines is that county swings now move closely together while a growing share of votes is cast in counties far from the national result, and that both facts describe places and not the people in them.

    This part asks how uniform county election results are and how that has changed since 1868. Chapter 10.1, Nationalization of the county vote measures how closely county swings follow the national swing, and Chapter 10.2, Distance from the national vote, 1868 to 2024 asks what share of voters live in counties far from the national result. Both use full counts of votes for places, so they describe counties and not the people in them. The planned chapters ask how much ticket splitting remains, how far the tipping-point state sits from the popular vote, and how the Southern county map of the 1870s relates to the map of 2024. The Elections explorer puts the returns on a map.

    Explorer for this part: Elections, 1976 to 2024. States and counties by year: margins, swings and demographic lenses.

    Chapters

    1. 10.1

      Nationalization of the county vote

      Counties moved more nearly in step in 2020 to 2024 than in any other pair of presidential elections since 1868, with a vote-weighted standard deviation of county swings of 4.5 points against 5.0 in 2008 to 2012, the next lowest.

      DraftPlacescounty-returns

    2. 10.2

      Distance from the national vote, 1868 to 2024

      The share of two-party votes cast in counties at least 20 points from the national margin rose from 25.5% in 1976 to 56.5% in 2024, and every region is now above 50%, as only the South was in 1904.

      DraftPlacescounty-returns

    3. 10.3

      Down the ballot

      In 2024 4.7% of ANES voters reported different parties for president and the House, against 22.3% in 1992, and the presidential and House winners differed in 2.8% of counties in which every district part of the House race was contested, against 31.0% in 1992.

      DraftPlacesanescounty-returnsstate-returns

    4. 10.4

      The Electoral College

      How far is the tipping-point state from the popular vote, and how many states are competitive?

      PlannedPlacesstate-returnscounty-returns

    5. 10.5

      Reconstruction and the modern map

      How does the Southern county map of the 1870s relate to the map of 2024?

      PlannedPlacescounty-returnscounty-demographics