What is the Political Geography of Rhode Island?

I grew up in NY, but spent many of my summers during my childhood and beyond in RI. I'm pretty familiar with the state.

RI is a much more working class state than I think people outside of the Northeast realize. It's not down there in the bottom quartile of income or anything, but most people from other areas of the country have this image in their head of RI being full of rich people in stereotypical coastal New England towns. That's only partly accurate.

In reality, a lot of these little towns like Newport and so on, are vacation spots. People have summer houses here (or in other places like Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons), but don't actually live there. So these are the "elites" that Singletxguy is talking about, but he's mis-characterizing what's going on a little. We used to have a house in Newport (more of a cottage really), but we didn't actually live there year-round (most of our family during the school year was either in Manhattan or our house in Long Island). A lot of the people I knew that left during the year usually had their "actual family house" in the NYC suburbs, or Boston and so on. The "townies" that stay there year round are typically either service employees that work the tourist industry, people that worked at the Naval base, or college students at URI. If you walk around Newport during the winter, it's an absolute ghost town. So most of the "elites" are not actually voting in RI.

RI is a very Dem state, but not for the same reasons that people vote D in the Bay Area CA or Fairfax County VA, etc. Like I said, the year-round people there are actually very working class and you'll find lots of blue collar workers in unionized maritime industries, like longshoremen and what not. Historically Providence was also a very large manufacturing center, which it still is in some sense, but these sectors have predictably declined in a Rust-Belt type way. Anyways this demographic is very heavy in RI; and it's a demographic you can find in MA as well.. places all around the MA Bay, Cape Cod, towns like New Bedford, Quincy and South Boston and East Boston (although some of these areas are changing- Quincy is very Asian now, New Bedford is now 1/3 Portuguese and large portions of South Boston have gentrified with yuppies priced out of nicer areas in Back Bay).

So a lot of these voters are Dems, but it has little to do with cultural reasons. So someone like a Trump is actually close to the perfect candidate for a place like RI, which would explain why every county swung R this cycle. It's too early to tell whether this is a long-term thing or not (part of this, I think, will depend on if polarization continues, and especially if it gets increasingly stratified by racial lines).

Anyways, most towns closer to the vacation areas and Providence voted D (as singletxguy explained), where most of the "interior" areas voted R. The richest places in RI are Barrington and East Greenwich (southern suburbs of Providence), which voted Clinton 65-31 and 54-42 respectively. The third richest place is Richmond which is a rural area that's sorta out of the way.. you'd have no reason to really go through there unless you were driving to URI or the Kingston train station from I-95. Richmond voted Trump 51-43.

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