America’s urban-rural divides

ACCORDING TO THE Cook Political Report, which ranks every district in Congress by voters’ strength of support for one party or the other, Virginia’s eighth district is heading Democratic faster than any other in the country. This does not mean that it is changing from Republican to Democrat. Virginia 08 is Democratic already, just becoming even more so. The man charged with stopping this momentum for the benefit of the Republicans is Jim Presswood, head of the Arlington county Republican committee. Mr Presswood is an environmental activist who once worked for the Natural Resources Defence Council, an NGO. He has a pronounced interest in the sort of changes to farming championed by the farm-to-table movement. These are not typical preoccupations among Republican activists, but Mr Presswood voted for Mr Trump, mainly because he could not support a pro-choice candidate. In this district over 100,000 people work for the government, and Mr Trump lost it by miles. “Drain the swamp was a tough message for us,” muses Mr Presswood. “This is the swamp.”

Virginia 08 takes in Arlington, which includes the pretty 18th-century town that was already there when Washington, DC, was built just across the Potomac. The district’s Democratic congressman, Don Beyer, used to run a family car dealership (Volvo, naturally) and was appointed ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein after collecting money for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. This is the sort of CV that resonates with voters in northern Virginia, an area dotted with independent coffee shops serving customers who use words like “artisanal”. An impressive 30% of over-25s have postgraduate degrees, compared with 12% nationally. Across America, education levels have become much stronger predictors than income of how people will vote. Hillary Clinton did much better in America’s 50 most educated districts than Mr Obama did, and performed far worse than he did in the 50 least educated. People with postgraduate qualifications tend to buy houses next to others like them, just as those with less schooling tend to cluster together.