A Nation's Divisions

There have been several highly thought out and creative maps used to show the results of the recent presidential election. The best attempt to indicate not only the party favored by counties (and the cities, regions, and states composed by them) but also the relative weight of those counties in terms of population, either by shade or by bar height.

These results have been interpreted in different ways. The U.S. is not as divided as people make it out to be. The U.S. is as divided as people make it out to be, but along urban-rural lines rather than state lines. The U.S. is not that divided even in urban-rural lines. Emily Badger comes close to the core of the situation when she states that the policies favored by urban residents align more closely with the policies identified with the Democrats.

Cities do demand, by definition, a greater role for government than a small rural town on the prairie. But the return on investment can also be much higher (in jobs created through transportation spending, in the number of citizens touched by public expenditures, in patents per capita, in the sheer share of economic growth driven by our metropolises).

Density makes all of these things possible, and it requires its own kind of politics. There’s no reason why the Democratic Party should have an exclusive lock on this idea. Investing government money efficiently – as Republicans want to do – is also about focusing on how it’s spent in cities.

 So how does that fit with the fact that the Democratic ticket won rural states such as Iowa and New Hampshire and with the lack of proof that "the results of the election that urban turnout over all played the decisive role in swing states like Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia or Wisconsin"? Perhaps it relates to the increasing similarities between urban cores and older, especially inner-ring, suburbs. The need for investment and reinvestment in key infrastructures, in schools, in municipal safety, and in many other aspects of what defines a community is not unique to big cities. But neither is the desire for tax revenues to be spent efficiently and fairly unique to rural residents. We need policies that will focus on spending available funds in ways that will provide an efficient economic, social, and moral return on the investment for the greater community. Now if only we could decide on what that would look like...