Beyond Virginia: How America’s Big Counties Are Reshaping Politics

Whether they want it or not, the last year has given Americans a master class in political polarization.

But the terminology commonly used to describe the peeling apart of the country’s Republican and Democratic factions — “red states and blue states,” “coastal elitists vs. flyover country” and the like — tends to overlook the far more local widening fissures within the states themselves, between diverse and well-educated urban counties and their less populated surroundings. CONT.

Carrie Dann, NBC News