Looking by county, Americans are becoming geographically much more polarized in party politics for President.
Ultimately, that's not a good thing. Being around a significant number of other people who hold different political views than you do not only encourages tolerance (or at least politeness), but it does provide exposure to alternate ideas, perspectives, arguments. It can actually lead to changing of minds.
It's also not a good thing because political parties are awful proxies for ideology. Within both parties are a myriad of political viewpoints, but any given individual should able to find themselves allied with individuals on the "other side" on certain issues. By having party voting trump that sort of mixture, people end constrained by a platform box in all things.
Finally, to the extent that presidential voting and other voting are related, this sort of increased polarization correlates with increased division with in legislatures and the like, with less centrist candidates, with a disdain for compromise, and with an us-vs-them mentality that not only fractures good governance, but society itself, in ways that don't bode well for the nation, the states, or any of us.
Purple America Has All But Disappeared
President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was among the narrowest in history, and the country is deeply split on his job performance so far. But if you feel like you hardly know anyone w…
Hm… How much of this is a result of the 2010 republican gerrymandering, though? That concentrates voters in districts, so the landslide effect could be magnified by that.
I do think we're generally more polarized than we were a decade or more ago, though. There's just so many feedback loops.
+Cindy Brown I would assume that since lower population counties get lumped in to various districts it's not much of an effect for them as much as cities getting sliced apart to be lumped into those rural low population counties to dilute the Dem vote.
+Cindy Brown The above chart is by county, not by district, so redistricting wouldn't matter.