The American Nations and the 2020 Election

Readers of my “Balkanized America” series here at Medium may be interested in what the American Nations paradigm has to say about the results of the 2020 presidential election, about the alleged primeval split between rural and urban voters, and about patterns compared to 2016, when Donald Trump surprised many by eking out an Electoral College victory (while losing the popular vote) by flipping scores of rural Obama counties in Yankeedom.

Good news: with the help of colleague Chad Gilley, I’ve done a preliminary analysis of this month’s presidential election over at the Portland Press Herald. (It’s a metered paywall there, so if you bump into it, consider subscribing to support local journalism for the sake of the republic, etc.)

If you’re not familiar with American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, start here in the series Medium commissioned from me a few years back. If you are familiar with it, consider the rest of the informal trilogy: American Character: The Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good and the recently-released Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, which tells the all-too-relevant backstory to our current political struggle here in the United States.