@Thane15
Get a results map of the US (link below, but wait a mo) and you will see three main areas of blue: the north east on the hinterland from DC to Boston, centred on New York; Illinois, centred on Chicago and the west coast, centred on Greater LA/ San Francisco/ San Diego but reaching to to Seattle. These are the three great metropolitan regions of the North America; cultured, outward looking and international in outlook (Chicago has the biggest futures and options market in the world, bigger even than London).
Even in Red states you will see that the largest cities (Miami, FL; Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA,, for instance) usually voted Clinton.
BUT
Despite, for example, New York going Blue, upstate New York was mainly Red, save the more populous counties. Also true in Illinois where pretty well only Chicago itself was blue (but enough to bag the state). As a general rule, the further away a county or district was from very large cities, the more likely it was to vote Trump.
Some commentators said this presented a “urban vs rural” explanation, but trust a geographer to note that the truth is more complex: it is cosmopolitan and global vs parochial and regional. The more likely a voter is to a) be educated b) to have traveled and c) to have met people different to themselves, the more likely to vote Clinton – and that is most likely to be found in the great conurbations especially the east and west coast super-conurbations and it gradually falls off until rural counties are almost universally red. But some central cities went red too.
Massachusetts (Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Mass General Hospital) was the only state to go 100% Blue.
Additional note of interest: there is a fascinating strip from Memphis, south along the Mississippi toward New Orleans that is mainly blue. Wanna guess what skin colour is the predominant one there? Despite this block, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi all went red.
Here is a very cool map to explore it.
An identical pattern can be seen in the Brexit vote in the UK with most (but not all) of the main centres of immigration and main centres of learning (plus the whole of Scotland and nearly all of London) voting remain.
It’s about attitudes to race (and in the US disgusting levels of misogyny).
The comparison between the EU and DC is somewhat offensive, since the EU never elected a fascist to lead it. It is the sort of misapprehension that comes from using Debbie from Derby for information, rather than looking at actual data.
