‘Red’ America is an illusion. Postindustrial towns go for Democrats.

Media professionals and intellectuals in the large coastal cities have long struggled to understand the white, non-metropolitan counties in the middle of the country. Just as Christians often fail to understand the diversity of the faraway Islamic world, American coastal elites have come to see the non-metro sections of the heartland as an undifferentiated mass of white, evangelical Republicans. This is far from the reality.