
The most and least politically open-minded counties in the United States - andygcook
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/us-counties-vary-their-degree-partisan-prejudice/583072/
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ChrisRR
Can someone explain to me as a non-American? What causes those hard boundaries
in opinions along the state lines? Eg. Between Utah and Wyoming, or South
Carolina and everywhere around it

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madcaptenor
I suspect a lot of the state-level stuff is artifacts of the algorithm. The
article says that only 2000 people were polled, and there are about 3000
counties, so there's a lot of modeling that goes on to get from the poll
results to the map. It's a two-step process: (1) build a model which predicts
partisanship from individual demographics. (2) apply this to individual-level
demographic data and aggregate to get partisanship by county.

But! The demographics come from voter files. And voter files are maintained by
the states. So the people _overall_ in some county in South Carolina might be
quite similar to those in a bordering county in North Carolina, but the ones
_in the voter file_ are not.

I'd take within-state differences seriously, but I wouldn't take between-state
differences seriously.

(However! Utah is dominated by Mormons and you really do see differences in a
lot of maps between Utah and adjacent states.)

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dsfyu404ed
> the most politically intolerant county in America appears to be Suffolk
> County, Massachusetts, which includes the city of Boston

This surprises exactly nobody outside of the Boston area.

>We are now judging one another’s fundamental decency based on whether we eat
at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A

This describes a running joke in my office perfectly. The "sieze the means"
socialist prefers Chipotle and thinks Chick-Fil-a is terrible. The right
leaning libertarian strongly prefers Chick-Fil-A and dislikes Chipotle. We all
agree that Panera is overpriced for what it is, Market Basket has great deals
on prepared food and the mayor of Boston has no business telling a business
they're aren't welcome because he doesn't like who they give money to.

