With impeachment efforts against Donald Trump gaining momentum and U.S. politics becoming ever more combative, we found three charts this week that describe the divisions in contemporary America.
A client recently sent us the great interactive chart and quiz above from the New York Times, published this August. Based on various factors like religion, background and sexuality, they’ll predict the likelihood that you would vote Republican or Democrat. According to the Times, party allegiances are now more predictable than ever based on demographic factors.
This is worrying, as they argue, because it makes politics less about logical arguments, “what government should do”, and more about which people a government represents, a divisive us-vs-them dynamic. This dynamic can be exploited by politicians to sway people with xenophobic and identity based rhetoric.
Another dividing factor is geography. Threatened with impeachment, Trump recently attempted to show the vast support he commands by tweeting a map. Breaking the country down by county, it shows middle America as majority Republican with only small Democratic strips along the coasts:
In response, the French newspaper Libération created this graphic, which shows the United States with surface area adjusted for the number of voters.
Karim Douïeb created this mesmerising gif version:
On the topic of land area and divisions, Bloomberg recently published an interesting piece about land ownership in America:
Their map shows how the 100 largest private landowners in the US own an area the size of Florida – 40 Million acres. From voters to landholdings, it seems nothing is evenly distributed.
