In the weeks before the election, one of the most interesting (if underreported) poll findings came from Public Religion Research Institute; at the time, it seemed like just a neat bit of trivia, but in retrospect, it wound up having a lot of explanatory power.
White voters who still live in the community in which they were raised are supporting Trump over Clinton by 26 percentage points (57% vs. 31%, respectively). Trump also has an advantage over Clinton among white voters who live within a 2-hour drive from their hometown (50% vs. 41%, respectively). However, among white voters who live farther away from their hometown, Clinton leads Trump (46% vs. 40%, respectively).
When you looked at a map of which places swung the hardest from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, it was most heavily concentrated in the so-called “Rust Belt,” the non-urban parts of the Midwest where you have a stagnant or falling population, and an almost entirely white electorate with lower levels of college education than the national average. But if you also looked at which parts of the country had the highest level of people who are still living near where they grew up, it would also focus on those same states. The Census Bureau doesn’t collect data on whether people still live in the community where they were raised, but they do ask if people still live in the state where they were born; four of the six states with the highest rates of living-in-the-state-you-were-born are the ones that most notoriously tipped the election (Michigan in 2nd place, Ohio in 3rd, Pennsylvania in 4th, and Wisconsin in 6th).
It’s not a clearly causal relationship; it might be that the rate of white voters without college educations is the most relevant piece of data in terms of what drove the swing, and that staying in place just correlates strongly with being white and not college-educated. (In other words, these parts of the country don’t have a lot of immigrants, and they don’t even have a lot of people who’ve moved there from elsewhere in the country to pursue educational or work opportunities … and the people who’ve left for educational opportunities, by and large, haven’t moved back.)
In light of the possibility that there’s an important mindset here that pollsters are just beginning to pick up on (of people who feel literally left behind by the global economy, and are feeling resentful about it), let’s incorporate that topic into our ongoing “Most District” series at Daily Kos Elections, and look at which CD most fits the category. The congressional district with the highest level of people who were born in the same state isn’t in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, but it’s still part of the same “Rust Belt” arc that passes around the Great Lakes and into the northeast; it’s New York’s 27th congressional district, located in Upstate New York east and north of Buffalo.
The largest population center in the district is the city of Niagara Falls, which, despite its picturesque namesake, isn’t much of a tourist destination (most of the tourist activity … the hotels, knickknack stores, and mini golf courses ... is over on the Canadian side). It’s a city that’s had a large decline in its manufacturing base, and its population has fallen from over 100,000 in 1960 to around 50,000 today.
The district also includes some of Buffalo’s outer suburbs, some other smaller declining industrial towns like Lockport and Batavia, and a swath of rural counties (Genesee, Orleans, and Wyoming). It’s by no means the whitest district in the country (those are primarily in Appalachia), but it is well above the national average for that category (92 percent non-Hispanic white, compared to 62 percent nationwide). Thanks to the Buffalo suburbs portion of the district, though, it’s a district with a pretty average level of education (29.3 percent of the district’s persons 25 or older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 30.3 percent nationwide).
In the 27th, 85.6 percent of the population was born in New York, compared with 58.5 percent nationally. The second-place district, and the one that was in first place in 2014, is, however, a demographically similar district in one of the election’s decisive states: Michigan’s 4th congressional district, located in the central part of that state. It has a similar mix of rural turf and smaller cities with a declining manufacturing base, in this case Midland. Unlike Michigan (where the population of Detroit represents less than 10 percent of the state’s total population), though, New York City and its environs have a large enough Democratic base to far outweigh any decline in Upstate New York, so New York as a whole wasn’t in any danger in the 2016 election.
While Daily Kos Elections hasn’t calculated the presidential vote in NY-27 for 2016 yet, this is by far the reddest district in all of New York state; it went 43 percent for Obama and 55 for Romney in 2012, and 44/54 in 2008 under today’s boundary lines. If you want to track the decline specifically in Niagara County, though (the most populous county entirely within the district, and the location of the city of Niagara Falls), it went 56 percent for Trump and 38 percent for Clinton in 2016, after having gone 49.4 for Obama and 48.6 for Romney in 2012, putting on NY-27 on track for one of the steepest declines of any district this year. (In fact, Michael Dukakis even won Niagara County in 1988, 50-49.)
The current Representative for the 27th is Republican Chris Collins, who, reflecting the overall Trumpiness of this part of the country, was Trump’s earliest adopter; he was the first sitting member of Congress to endorse Trump, in February of 2016. (Collins, who had previously backed Jeb Bush until he dropped out, isn’t some sort of rogue outsider; he was the Erie County Executive from 2007 to 2011. He does seem to have some facility at reading the demographic trends in his district, though.) Given that this is New York’s reddest district and seems to have shifted even further right this year, Collins is not likely to be a particularly vulnerable target in 2018. Collins’ name was floated for both the 2010 and 2014 New York gubernatorial elections, so at some point he might free the seat up for a (likely futile, given the state’s overall blueness) run for higher office.
Collins won the seat in 2012 by defeating Democratic Rep. Kathy Hochul (who’s now Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant governor), who had previously shocked the political world by winning a special election in 2011 in this seat’s predecessor, then numbered the 26th. She was the first Democrat to represent some parts of the district in over 40 years, defeating GOP state Assemblywoman Jane Corwin in what, at the time, was considered a proxy war over Paul Ryan’s draconian budget plans. Redistricting, however, turned Hochul’s district even redder; Collins, who needed a new job after losing re-election as Erie Co. Executive in 2011, took advantage of the changed district lines to knock out Hochul after just one-and-a-half years on the job. (As you may remember, Hochul got into office largely because the previous Rep., Chris Lee, had to resign his seat after getting caught sending shirtless photos of himself to women on Craigslist.)
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.