Which state do you think has the biggest rural-urban divide?

[ElectionsGuy]

I think its Pennsylvania. Literally the rural areas vote 70% for Republicans, and the most urban areas - even in Republican areas, vote heavily Democratic. All the Democratic vote is concentrated into the urban cores of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Erie, Scranton, Harrisburg, Allentown, etc. The more out you go from the urban core, the more GOP it gets. Just looking at the precincts in Lancster County (a well populated R County) the city of Lancaster was heavily Democratic,the immediate surroundings were a mix, and the rural areas were very heavily Republican. There was also no county under 100,000 in population to vote for Obama 2012 in Pennsylvania.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

And on the other end, I think in New Hampshire and Alaska the rural areas are actually more Democratic, but not sure.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

NV and MO

[Sol]

Nebraska is a really strong contender IMO.

[Brittain33]

Maryland is pretty extreme.

[jimrtex]

NV and MO

NV has no rural population.

[Ebsy]

Missouri. It's basically two different states at this point. Illinois is pretty bad as well.

[ElectionsGuy]

Pennsylvania is probably the best answer for the Northeast, but it doesn't really compare with most states west of the Mississippi, reservations excepted.

Has anyone regressed population density vs. average R/D vote share by voting district/municipality/county/some other geographic unit for each state? That would be one way to come up with a quantifiable answer.

Here's a scatter chart I made in excel of Wisconsin counties excluding Milwaukee (because its so up there it makes the chart look terrible). On the bottom, negative values represent Romney margins and positive values represent Obama margins. Vertically, its the number of people per square mile. Obviously Wisconsin isn't a contender here but I made this because I thought of your post and did it for fun.

[ElectionsGuy]

I made one for Pennsylvania:

[Bandit3 the Worker]

Are we just talking about what's within city limits? The Pennsylvania thing might be because cities there don't annex much land. In other states, the cities annex more land that might be suburban in character.

[traininthedistance]

If we're measuring this by plotting counties' population density against partisanship, and seeing who has the strongest correlation... I'm pretty sure the winner will be Delaware.

[ElectionsGuy]

If we're measuring this by plotting counties' population density against partisanship, and seeing who has the strongest correlation... I'm pretty sure the winner will be Delaware.

There's other and better ways to measure it, I just did it because I have time and thought it would be interesting.

[traininthedistance]

If we're measuring this by plotting counties' population density against partisanship, and seeing who has the strongest correlation... I'm pretty sure the winner will be Delaware.

Counties are not the ideal unit of analysis for several reasons, but they are easy to work with, so I don't fault anyone for experimenting with the data just to see what happens. If we were actually attempting a serious ranking of every state we'd want to a use much smaller unit of analysis - ideally one that varies less, proportionally, in population (or, at least, we'd need to weight for it). And obviously there's no getting around the modifiable areal unit problem.

We're also not just interested in the strength of the correlation. As long we're sticking with ElectionsGuy's original question, we're looking for a state where the correlation between population density and voting behavior is strong and the degree of geographic variation in voting behavior is high.

Well, of course.

Though Delaware isn't just a winner because it's a small sample size outlier, the urban/rural split is genuinely quite wide there as well.  The widest in the country?  I dunno.  But it deserves to be in the conversation.

[Sol]

Unhhh, I don't know. There are genuinely Democratic bits of Southern Delaware--Rehoboth Beach, Lewes, and various bits of small-town Sussex County. Not to mention some GOP friendly bits in the more suburban parts of New Castle County.