The Big Sort

[Note: I drafted this several days ago but didn't publish.  Then I wrote yesterdays post. Although I never added the links, I ]

I've played with the idea that our big sort  resulted from the proliferation of housing developments after WWII. 

Today from pieces in my two newpapers I'm more persuaded by another factor:

• The Post had a graphic showing how population had shifted--people had moved from the smaller states to the bigger states, presumably the big metropolitan areas within the states (i.e., Massachusetts, New York, DC, Texas, Florida, California.
• The Times had a graphic showing the party splits in presidential elections from 1988 to 2020.  You see some states moving to the Democrats (Virginia, Colorado, New Jersey) and some states moving to the Republicans, and other states become more of what they were before (especially Dakotas)

So my new idea is the younger Democrats are moving to economic opportunity. The nation has emphasized the value of higher education since the 1940's.  The jobs for college graduates tend to be in the bigger metropolitan areas, not in the more rural ones. 

Take a look at the rankings of states by education level.  Eyeballing the HS graduation, it looks as if the non-Southern Republican stats do very well. The South and NY (40th) are low  and CA ( is at the bottom. When you change to bachelors degrees the picture changes drastically.  NY has jumped from 40th to  10th, CA  to 14th, and the top is dominated by Democratic states.  When you go to advanced degrees the spread at the top widens a lot.

Where are the divisions? 

They identify four areas of gradually deepening division: economic inequality, political partisanship, and questions of identity relating to race, as well as gender and sexuality.

From wikipedia:

 Additionally, since the 1970s, income disparities have disproportionately increased in metropolitan areas due to the concentration of high-skilled jobs in urban zones.[10][11] For example, even though New York is the state with the highest inequality levels in the country, the upstate part of the state has a much lower rate of income inequality than the downstate, as the economy of New York City (Gini index 0.5469)[12] is highly reliant on high-salary earners.[11] States with better financial development tend to be more unequal than those with worse financial opportunities, but the trends go in the opposite directions for high-income and low-income states, with the former actually seeing more equality up to a certain level of development, beyond which the inequality rises non-linearly