Post Description

Even by twenty-first-century standards, the 2016 election was unusually polarizing. Some Americans were elated. Others—ourselves included—were aghast. Paul Krugman, the longtime syndicated columnist for the New York Times, spoke for many of his readers when he confessed to feeling an overwhelming sense of despair as the final votes were being tallied. Before election night, Krugman presumed that whatever their partisan differences, the vast majority of Americans shared basic values. But the election exposed an “unknown country”—a foreign land where American citizens apparently disdained “democratic norms and the rule of law.”¹

At the time, Krugman probably was not aware that the unknown country he supposed was crowded with bad democrats, was, in fact, full of his fellow Democrats. Almost one-third of the counties that voted twice for Obama went for Trump. And many of them had not just supported Obama—they had also been loyal to the Democratic Party for decades (see the table in the appendix).² Some had not even supported a Republican president since prior to the New Deal. In fact, one county—Elliott County, Kentucky—had never voted for a Republican candidate since it was formed in the 1860s, the longest Democratic voting streak in the nation.