Kennedy Waterman - The Election Highlighted a Growing Rural-Urban Split

In the last election (2012), we saw a political divide between rural and urban counties. Rural counties tended to vote Republican, while urban tended to vote Democratic. In this year's election, we saw an even bigger divide. Donald Trump didn't do very well in cities, such as Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, or Seattle. Most of his votes came from the Midwest. Hillary Clinton obviously got most of the votes in cities. This is due to economic differences.

The article was written November 11th, just days after the election results. Before reading it, I knew Dallas, a major city, was usually blue, but I didn't realize that trend followed in most other big cities. I think the article was written for people in both rural and urban areas to help them understand why certain people in certain geographical locations vote the way they do. This article is important because there has been a lot of talk about how the country is divided more than ever right now, and this just seems to be more proof. Of course, rural and urban areas offer different ways of life and are always going to be a bit divided, but according to the article, the gap is widening. This can be related to plenty of things in the past. One example is the North and the South dividing over the issue of slavery. Farmers in the South felt they needed slaves to make money, while Northern workers didn't need slaves since they couldn't farm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/upshot/this-election-highlighted-a-growing-rural-urban-split.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=29&pgtype=sectionfront