Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump.

[dalton99a]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/2020-census-shrinking-counties-voted-trump.html

Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump.
Ninety percent of counties that lost population in the last decade backed the ex-president.
By Jordan Weissmann
Aug 14, 2021 5:40 AM

Donald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country’s past more than its more urban and diverse future.

The latest data from the 2020 Census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.

Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.

This isn’t a new story, per se. Rural America and small towns have been losing residents for decades. But the trend seems to have accelerated. From 2000 to 2010, for instance, only around one third of all counties lost residents.

...

[Skittles]

1. GOOD

maybe America can MOVE FORWARD

[rownesheck]

2. maybe.

but the senate still gives a lot of influence to empty land. And the electoral college is an ancient relic that no longer serves a purpose in this day and age (other than to allow Republicans to win the presidency while losing the popular vote). Unless those 2 things change, we've still got a long difficult road ahead.

[Scrivener7]

3. And, tragically, Covid is going to remove a whole lot more of their populations.

[Chainfire]

4. If you travel through small towns in Florida, Georgia and Alabama

(which are all I have personal knowledge of) every year, you see more vacant commercial buildings. Once fine homes of the small town elites are falling into disrepair as the kids are getting out of Dodge. There are things that Americans want that small towns can't provide, so the people are abandoning the rural life. It suits this rural hermit just fine, the more rednecks that move to the regional population centers to make a living, the less I have to deal with them.

[pfitz59]

5. Many small towns are soul-crushing cesspits

full of bigots and busy-bodies. Rife with deliberate ignorance and hostility toward science and education. No wonder they're dying...