Let's build an relevant "urban/suburban/rural county" map

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'd love to work on this! I'd be happy to work on Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, or possibly even upstate New York.

I'd recommend standards that are more "impressionistic" than most metrics; viz., since this will presumably be intended to measure political behavior, how the people in each area think of themselves should have a primary role. People in very dense, built-up areas can still think of themselves as suburban, and people in counties dominated by exurbia or one or a few small cities very often still think of themselves as rural or at least "small-town". I think we should for the most part follow people's lead in those determinations. For example, the ~lived experience~ of Berkshire County is (in my opinion) that of a rural area, even though a lot of its population is concentrated in Pittsfield and North Adams.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'd be very willing and interested to help (for either Illinois or Iowa), but yeah, I'd need some clarification!  Iowa and Illinois are especially good examples of where that distinction gets messy, and someone on the East Coast might consider a county rural that literally no one in our states would.  Here is Downtown Peoria, in Peoria County, IL:



Personally, I would find it crazy to call such a place rural, but if you did some arbitrary population cutoff, Peoria County might fall short (population of 185,006) ... after all, there is very significant population across the river in Tazewell County (134,385).  Even with both combined, people from the huge metro areas out east might not be satisfied, but the living experience in Peoria is clearly not rural, whatever you want to call it, at least not to the people of Illinois.

Excellent counterpoint to my post. These are exactly the sorts of discussions the Census Bureau never seems to have.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'd be happy to do Indiana although I've never made colored county maps on here.
Could somebody run me through how to go about that?
Also I would suggest a fourth category for counties with small industrial cities/college towns (for example Tippecanoe county Indiana is not surburban, but it seems incorrect to call it urban and especially not rural)

Urban, suburban, rural, and small-city, then? That'd clarify the status of at least two counties in Massachusetts, and is probably a more helpful metric for measuring certain recent political trends anyway.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Can I give my first impressions for Massachusetts or do we want to agree more on ground rules first?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

NY:

Urban: Bronx, Kings/Brooklyn, New York/Manhattan, Queens
"Small City": Albany, Broome, Erie, Monroe, Oneida, Onondaga
Suburban: Nassau, Niagara, Rensselaer, Richmond/Staten, Rockland, Schenectady, Suffolk, Westchester
Rural: Everything else

I think parts of Saratoga would count as suburban. I'd consider Dutchess small-city and several of your small-city counties urban. My criteria for something being a "big" city are evidently a lot less stringent than all you city slickers'.

Massachusetts, done on a resolutely impressionistic and "way of life"-oriented basis:

Urban: Suffolk, Norfolk, Bristol, Hampden
Urban or suburban: Middlesex
Suburban: Essex, Plymouth, Worcester
Small-city: Barnstable, Hampshire, Berkshire
Rural: Franklin, Dukes, Nantucket

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think that works for most of the country. I'd resist its application to the parts of the Northeast I'm most familiar with because the way people identify and align themselves is in general somewhat more spatially constrained.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It would be interesting to have one map set by a delineation we all decide on, but another based entirely on perception of people from those states. Just pure perception.

I'd be in favor of having both, yeah.