The Most Republican Counties in America
Tradeoffs of Economic Opportunity and Shared Values
The only continually useful skills I learned as an engineering student were a general familiarity and moderate expertise with spreadsheets and the necessity of working through problems step-by-step instead of jumping to conclusions. I put both of these to work recently when I downloaded the dataset of 2020 election returns for all 3000+ counties and parishes. I was curious to see the relationship between county size and Republican voting.
Republicans, of course, do best in the most rural areas, and the data isn’t surprising when sorting by raw percentage of votes for the Republican presidential candidate:
These are all tiny rural counties with very small populations. What counties are the biggest outliers for Republican support when adjusting for size?
Ranking by Percentile
One way to do this is to weigh the Republican voting percentage and size* equally by rank and multiply the resulting percentiles together to get a composite number. For example, a county at the 75th percentile for Republican support and 50th percentile for size would receive a composite score of 0.75 x 0.5 = 0.375. Sorting this way, we get the following top ten counties:
* for convenience, I use the total number of votes as a proxy for county size.
I would describe this list as “the most Republican counties with significant economic opportunity.” That is, these are the kinds of places, mostly suburbs of midsize cities, where professionals can find good jobs. They’re not the most prestigious places to live, but they’re not bereft of economic opportunity like the most rural counties that are the most Republican. For me personally, this is helpful for my self-knowledge. I am from Livingston Parish originally, the #1 placeholder for Republican voting adjusted for size, and now live in a county in Texas that is also in the top ten. It’s useful for social calibration to know when you’re an outlier.
Ranking by Z-Scores
While I think it’s a useful way to rank, I think a statistician would frown on my simply multiplying percentiles. The more scientific way to compare two variables is to normalize them with what’s called a z-score, where you divide each number by its average relative to how much the numbers vary around that average. Since size among counties varies a lot more than election results, doing it this way will place a much bigger weight on size than Republican voting. Here are the top ten rankings when sorted by the composite of their multiplied z-scores for size and Republican voting percentage:
Perhaps the best way to describe this list is “the most Republican counties with a Whole Foods Market.” These are places with nearly unlimited economic and professional opportunities that also have extraordinarily Republican electorates. Montgomery County, Texas (largest city The Woodlands), is far and away an extreme, incomparable outlier, its score composite more than double the second-place county, Utah County, Utah (largest city Provo). Parker County, a suburb of Fort Worth, has the distinction of being the only county to make both lists. Overall, the states of the Gulf Coast dominate this list as the most conservative region in the country. One could say that the Gulf Coast is a great place to be based.
I happen to live on the Gulf Coast because I’m from here, and if I weren’t I wouldn’t move across the country and sever those organic ties to live in the most conservative region. The same analysis, however, could be applied to individual states to balance these competing interests.
Those interested in further analysis, including filtering by individual states, can download a copy of the spreadsheet here. One thing my analysis doesn’t capture is prosperous conservative pockets of large, urban counties. Perhaps the best example of this is the cities of Highland Park and University Park near Dallas. Both are among the most prosperous areas in the world and feature Republican voting exceeding 60%.
On Choosing a Place to Live
Why would choosing a place to live based on shared values matter? I think everyone can agree we have lived in an era of unprecedented change in societal values. So I’ll present a hopefully somewhat logical argument:
The last few decades have seen vast and accelerating changes in the public values of our society.
Most people don’t think in terms of principles but merely update their media-informed firmware, like a robot, to whatever constitutes fashionable opinion in the era in which they happen to live.
Unless we happen to live in the era of human values that has finally arrived at perfection without error, then the minority of principled people will rightly find themselves at odds with many of society’s professed values.
Principled, talented people who have a functional hierarchy of values will not allow these disagreements to cause them to turn into obsessive, impoverished, and bitter cranks who completely avoid connections with the surrounding society.
Maintaining a connection to a surrounding society that operates contrary to your values requires holding private opinions with a great deal of wise discretion in their expression.
Sometimes this requires actual compromises in behavior contrary to your private opinions, especially behaviors that require community coordination to be sustainable. This must be carefully managed, requiring a great deal of mental strength to maintain. Many people cannot handle behaving one way while privately believing another, even if practically necessary to function.
This is much easier to do, the “hypocrisy” of sorts is minimized when your local community consists of people who are closer to your values than the surrounding society. This may be especially necessary if you hope to propagate those values to your children.
I’ll give a mild example of the sorts of compromises I’m talking about - I won’t give a “spicy” one because I’m writing publicly and being functionally principled requires discretion (see #5 above). Here’s the example:
I believe smartphones are really bad for children. According to my ideal principle, which I think is correct, smartphones, like alcohol and tobacco, should only be used by adults 21 and over* because of their addictive nature, teenagers being more prone to addictions of all kinds. The people who create these devices seem to agree with me when it comes to their own kids. However, other parents either are not thinking about it, disagree with my principle, or are too weak in their parental will to set the boundary. Once enough of my fellow parents defect and give their kids phones, to follow this principle perfectly I would make my children social outliers in a way that might be harmful to them. This is an example of a legitimate principle that only works in a community that shares the principle.
* I consider myself a moderate on this issue, as someone very close to me thinks society would be better off if all portable Internet-connected devices were burned in a giant bonfire celebrating the reclamation of our collective humanity.
Since in my hierarchy of values the social well-being of my children outranks my phone preferences, I had to come to a reasonable compromise of my principle, a practice I call “as much as I can get away with.” That is, when I have a principle that must bend, I still try to get away with as much of it as I can. So I settled on delaying phones until high school. My kids still get phones later than their peers, but not so much later to be unsustainable.
It helps that I am in a small, high-parental-investment school community where the average age of first smartphone is probably 7th grade, so I can “get away with” a practice of not allowing it until 9th grade. If we were in a school community where students received phones on average around 3rd or 4th grade (which is not atypical these days in public schools), my practice would be much more difficult to sustain. Hence, the values of your community impact how much you can practice your principles.
I am also comfortable holding this tension between principle and practice. What I have not done is adjust my principle to my practice by convincing myself that necessary compromises in behavior require me to change my real private opinion. To me, this is a necessary part of my growing in maturity and avoiding the false choice of being either a weirdo crank or an unprincipled, unthinking person.
It’s a concept I teach to my children as key to surviving with one’s values intact in a rapidly changing world. Those of us swimming upstream must increasingly borrow practices from other religious minorities, like Orthodox Jews or Mormons, and form local communities that share and reinforce our values, while still living and succeeding economically in a society increasingly opposed to those values.
All other things being equal, living somewhere where more people agree makes this much easier in practice.