Alabama Contains Several of the Country’s Most Partisan Counties

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July 13, 2017

With America’s political climate becoming increasingly divided, political scientists and researchers got to examine the extent of the country’s growing partisanship using results from the 2016 Presidential Election. In a phenomenon that experts are terming “The Great Sort,” Nearly 59 percent of Americans live in counties that are considered extremely partisan. More specifically 187 million people live in a county that went for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton by at least 20 percentage points.

Trump won 1,559 counties with at least 70 percent of the vote. Hillary 99 counties by the same margin. In just 16 years, the shift in the number of hyperpartisan counties has nearly doubled. George W. Bush won 546 with at least 70 percent of the vote, and Al Gore did the same in 46 counties during the 2000 Presidential Election.

The increasing political divide between urban and rural, and millennial and baby boomer is quickly becoming a geographic one as well. Red and blue America are starting to look and vote differently.

Several of America’s most partisan counties are located right here in Alabama. While it is likely no surprise that most of them are solidly Republican, Alabama does have two highly Democratic counties.

The Alabama counties considered among the nation’s most Republican are: Jackson, Dekalb, Cherokee, Cleburne, Marshall, Chilton, Geneva, Covington, Marion, Lamar, Fayette, Walker, Winston, Cullman, Blount, and St. Clair. The two Alabama counties dominated by the Democratic party are Greene and Macon.

One of those counties, Winston, gave Trump 89.4 percent of the vote November, making it the most pro-Trump county in the U.S. The area’s representative, Congressman Robert Aderholt (R-AL4) was not surprised at all.

“The fact our county voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump should not be a surprise,” Aderholt told Yellowhammer. “People were tired of an administration that seemed to constantly have the attitude of ‘blame America first’ and that if you lived in a rural area, you didn’t matter.”

Alabama’s Fourth Congressional District was also labeled as the “most Trumpy” in the nation by the left-wing site the Daily Kos after editors determined that 80.34 percent of area voters cast their ballots for the GOP President.