The EconomistNovember 14th 2020 United States 332 perate, grassland ecosystems left on Earth
(steppe land in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and
Patagonia are the other three). This territo-
ry of shortgrass prairie could become
America’s answer to the Serengeti, along
the upper reaches of the Missouri River.
In the view of many ranchers, whose
beef industry is worth $1.5bn annually in
Montana, that is a grim prospect. They
worry about more ranch land disappearing
into the reserve. “They’d be idling 3.5m
acres from food production,” complains
Mrs Robbins. She helps to run a campaign
against the “elite” apr, known as “Save the
Cowboy”. It opposes the sale of ranches to
the reserve and argues that the Bureau of
Land Management is wrong to allocate fed-
eral lands to it. Its placards, showing the
silhouette of a big-hatted horserider in an
orange sunset, are ubiquitous in central
Montanan towns.
A large one is in Lewistown, where the
apr will open a centre for tourists. Resi-
dents sound less than keen. “We’re trying
to preserve the ranching way of life against
a bunch of billionaires who came in and got
control”, says Kari Weingart. Her husband’s
family is unhappy that its old ranch has
been sold to the reserve. She says younger
Montanans, unexcited by city ways, are
growing interested in farming again but
struggle to find land. A rancher’s wife,
Joann Bristol, suspects the project is a ruse
by outsiders to take over from locals. The
spending power of the reserve is “scary”
while promises of gains from tourism are
“overblown” says another.
Then there are long-standing fears of
dangerous animals. The odd prairie dog
may be cute, but ranchers long ago exter-
minated wolves, mountain lions and griz-
zly bears which threatened their stock.
Now the apr wants them all back. Wolves
and bears may return on their own, from
Canada or Yellowstone. The first 850 bison
have already been reintroduced; they could
eventually number 10,000. Farmers worry
bison could trample fences or spread a dis-
ease, brucellosis, to cattle. Worse could be
the impact of huge increases in elk num-
bers. The apr wants 40,000 of them, ten-
times more than now, to serve as tasty prey
for predators. Ranchers fear escaping elk
will chomp grass their own cattle need.
Beth Saboe, of the apr, says complaints
are overblown. Land prices are rising in
Montana, she agrees, but not because of the
deep-pocketed charity. One recent factor is
that outsiders, fleeing cities because of co-
vid-19, are keen on second homes or land in
Big Sky Country. Nor is the apr hostile to
agriculture, she says. It lets farmers, for
now, graze 14,000 head of cattle on its land
and runs a company to sell bison meat.
With 63m acres in Montana for farming, it
also sees plenty of space for cowboys. No-
where else in America, however, could host
a prairie wildlife reserve of this scale. 7
F
or a moment, it looked as if voters were
starting to find some common ground.
In the weeks leading up to the elections on
November 3rd, polls showed that many of
the fault lines dividing Democrats and Re-
publicans—including age, race and educa-
tion—were beginning to narrow. Even the
gap between city dwellers and rural folk
seemed to be shrinking. According to a poll
conducted by YouGov between October 31st
and November 2nd, voters in rural areas fa-
voured President Donald Trump over Joe
Biden, his Democratic opponent, by a mar-
gin of ten percentage points. Four years
ago, this gap was 20 points.
But an analysis of the election results by
The Economistsuggests that the partisan di-
vide between America’s cities and open
spaces is greater than ever. Preliminary re-
sults supplied by Decision Desk hq, a data-
provider, show that voters in the least ur-
banised counties voted for Mr Trump by a
margin of 33 points, up from 32 points in- (Specifically these are the bottom
20% of counties by population density.
Counties which are more than 10% Hispan-
ics, which shifted right for reasons unrelat-
ed to density, have been excluded.) Mean-
while, voters in the most urbanised
counties—the top 20%—plumped for Mr
Biden by 29 points, up from Hillary Clin-
ton’s 25-point margin in 2016. More broad-
ly, the greater the population density, the
bigger the swing to the Democratic candi-
date (see chart). Even after controlling for
other relevant demographic factors, such
as the proportion of whites without college
degrees or Hispanics in each county, the
data suggest that urban and rural voters are
more divided today than they were in 2016.
Preliminary results also show that Mr
Biden gained most ground in counties that
swung hardest toward Democrats between
Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 and Hil-
lary Clinton’s failed bid for the White
House in 2016. One possible explanation
for this trend is the tendency for Democrats
and Republicans to live among their own
kind. Americans are still sorting them-
selves into politically like-minded com-
munities, a movement noted by Bill Bishop
in “The Big Sort” published in 2008. For lib-
erals, this means diverse, densely populat-
ed cities; for conservatives it is places that
are mostly white, working-class and where
the neighbours are a .22 round away.
Such sorting has two major conse-
quences. Jonathan Rodden, a professor at
Stanford University and author of “Why
Cities Lose”, a book about geographic polar-
isation, says that the partitioning of Ameri-
ca by density has led to an underrepresen-
tation of Democratic votes. Because the
seats in the House of Representatives and
the Senate are awarded on a winner-take-
all basis, rather than in proportion to the
popular vote, they can end up skewing the
allocation of legislative seats away from
the party whose voters are crammed into
just a few states or congressional districts.
As Democrats cluster in cities, the system
reduces their political clout. It can be
thought of as a natural gerrymander.
Geographic polarisation also hurts
Democrats’ chances in the electoral col-
lege, America’s system of choosing its pres-
ident. In this year’s election, for example,
Mr Biden will win the national popular
vote by about five percentage points. But
his margin in the “tipping-point” state that
ultimately gave him enough votes to win
the election, Wisconsin, will be less than
one point. That four-point advantage for
the Republicans is the biggest in at least
four decades. So long as Democrats contin-
ue to be the party of the cities, and Repub-
licans the party of small-town and rural
America, those biases will persist. 7WASHINGTON, DC
Our analysis of the results suggests a
long-running trend has sped upThe urban-rural divideCity v hills
Big city blues
United States presidential elections
By county*Sources:DecisionDeskHQ;USCensusBureau;TheEconomist2016-20 change in Democratic votemargin
Percentagepoints0.1 1 10 100 1,000 10,000
Populationdensity,2020,peopleperkm2,logscale15
105
0-5
-10-15Circle size =
totalvotes, 2020*Excluding those in which Hispanics exceed 10% of the population