How the Rural-Urban Divide Became America’s Political Fault Line

It’s true across many industrialized democracies that rural areas lean conservative while cities tend to be more liberal, a pattern partly rooted in the history of workers’ parties that grew up where urban factories did. But urban-rural polarization has become particularly acute in America: particularly entrenched, particularly hostile, particularly lopsided […] Read more »

The Democratic Party is being transformed. These House votes show how.

The decisive House of Representatives vote last Friday barring discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity marked a milestone in shifting American attitudes toward gay rights. But it also represented a landmark in the evolution of the Democratic Party into an urbanized coalition centered on the voters and communities […] Read more »

Washington-area residents widely oppose paying a toll to drive into downtown D.C.

A clear majority of Washington-area residents oppose congestion pricing — charging drivers a toll to enter the District during high-traffic times to ease congestion — according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll. The survey finds that 63 percent of residents oppose the idea, nearly double the 34 percent who […] Read more »

Red counties are doing better under Trump — but not as well as blue cities

Large, mostly Democratic-leaning, metropolitan centers are consolidating their dominance of the national economy even as smaller, mostly Republican-leaning communities at their periphery show clear signs of economic revival under President Donald Trump, according to an extensive new analysis of regional economic dynamics published Tuesday. These twin trends — consolidation at […] Read more »

Trump’s battle with sanctuary cities is the next phase of his confrontation with urban America

President Donald Trump’s threats to relocate undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers to “sanctuary cities” capture his determination to constantly press the boundaries of law and morality with hardline immigration policies. But it may reveal even more about his political posture toward the nation’s biggest population centers. … Trump’s confrontational relationship […] Read more »

How the Urban/Rural Political Divide Plays Out in America’s Suburbs

America’s suburbs have been competitive battlegrounds in recent elections. But a new UChicago Harris/AP-NORC Poll finds that, contrary to popular perceptions of suburbanites as swing voters, there are actually fewer true independents in the suburbs compared to urban and rural areas of the country. While the average overall opinions of […] Read more »