This week at the <http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmcafe-book- club/>TPM Book Club, Bill Bishop will be discussing his book "The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart." He <http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/21/ the_quickest_way_to_describe/>opens the discussion with a simple calculation: "The quickest way to describe The Big Sort is with a simple calculation. In 1976, about a quarter of the voters lived in a county where either Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford won by 20 percentage points or more. The number of people living in landslide communities increased steadily over the next seven presidential elections. And by 2004, in another very close vote, nearly half of all voters lived in one of these landslide communities.
Places were becoming more politically homogeneous. You could see it in the data pieced together by statistician Robert Cushing. Counties would tip Republican or Democratic in presidential elections, and then the majorities would grow larger. (Seven out of ten people leaving red counties move to other red counties.) The red and blue state maps were meaningless to how we lived. In ink blue California, for example, 17 counties were growing more Democratic, 30 were becoming more Republican and the parties were getting more competitive in only 11 counties. Sixty percent of the nation's voters today live in communities that haven't changed their presidential party choice since 1988.
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