There are thousands of golf courses in the United States. You can find them in every state, in nearly every county; there’s probably one near you.
Take all those data points, and you can see that there are more golf courses for every 100,000 voters in redder neighborhoods than in blue ones.
There are also thousands of breweries in the U.S., but they’re much more concentrated on the coasts and in urban areas.
+60D
+40D
+20D
Even
+20R
+40R
+60R
The brewery-to-voter ratio is much higher in some of the country’s bluest precincts, where Joe Biden won the vote in 2020.
You can’t tell how people vote just by whether they enjoy a drink at a brewery or a round of golf. But the geographic distribution of these two places shows how much our surroundings differ, often unintentionally, along political lines.
It’s not just golf and brewing: People in America’s reddest neighborhoods see a different landscape of stores, restaurants and venues when they step outside their homes than those in more politically even precincts or the very bluest areas.
We wanted to look at this relationship between politics and the places around us. So, using data from the Overture Maps Foundation, we took the location of millions of different stores, restaurants, churches, parks and more and lined them up with the 2020 election results, down to the precinct.
We don’t know who goes to each place. But we know how the neighborhoods surrounding each locale vote.
The results are sometimes obvious: Yoga studios and cocktail bars skew toward deeply blue spaces, and gun stores and farms toward redder precincts. But they show how our politics, geography and lives intersect, not always in obvious ways.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
In many cases, these graphs look the way they do largely because of the urban-rural divide. Certain activities, like golf, need space, and the more rural parts of the country tend to vote for Republicans. Meanwhile, a small, Democratic-leaning urban area might be a commercial hub for a redder county, with a brewery, coffee shop and bookstore; those businesses would look blue in our data set even if they were frequented equally by Republicans and Democrats.
“The placement of businesses is probably motivated primarily by income level and population density,” said Nick Rogers, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “It just so happens that an area’s political ideology is highly correlated with these things.”
Some places, of course, are just everywhere:
Locations per voter
And some kinds of places don’t fit easily into one bucket or the other.
Consider Baptist churches: A majority of the tens of thousands of these churches in the U.S. are in the South. That means they’re heavily concentrated in both Republican neighborhoods and largely Black, heavily Democratic areas. The resulting distribution looks like this:
Locations per voter
Wineries, too, show a double hump. You can see that in California alone — with wine production clustered along both its bluer coastline and the redder Central Valley.
Locations per voter
For many brands, the partisan map emerges from the regional footprint of the business. Piggly Wiggly mostly serves redder states in the South, while Food Lion is spread across a more politically varied area in the Southeast.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
But the maps cut across people and places in different ways. A liberal voter in Los Angeles may have never heard of Piggly Wiggly. But it’s also possible that person has never heard of Stop & Shop, a supermarket in the bluer Northeast.
Other brands that aren’t so regionally clustered have expanded in pursuit of the clientele they already know. For example, Whole Foods, Peet’s Coffee and the upscale sportswear brand Lululemon have a high-earning urban customer base.
Locations per voter
The Overture data in this analysis reflects businesses and places that have logged their locations on either Meta or Microsoft platforms; the data is imperfect and includes mislabeled locations and closed stores. But this is the best publicly available data set of its kind, and it lets us see patterns in the data that aren’t captured by surveys of consumer preference.
Here’s a roundup of them.
Fast food
One fast food chain in many deep blue precincts is Popeyes. The chicken purveyor is found in many Southern cities but also across the West Coast and up and down I-95.
Locations per voter
Its competitor Chick-fil-A — despite an early 2010s controversy over gay rights — is also in many blue areas.
Locations per voter
Among the chains found in redder places are Tennessee-based Hardee’s and Oklahoma-based Sonic.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
And Burger King, like McDonald’s, is everywhere.
Locations per voter
Coffee shops
Starbucks is by far the nation’s largest coffee chain, and while it might feel as if it’s everywhere, it hews toward slightly denser locations.
Locations per voter
Some smaller coffee chains have a more significant skew. West Coast chains like Blue Bottle and Peet’s Coffee are common in some of the bluest areas; the largest chain in our data with a strong presence in redder areas is Scooter’s Coffee.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Breakfast spots
IHOP neighborhoods are bluer than those around the largely Midwestern restaurant Bob Evans. Huddle House is the major breakfast chain with the highest frequency in red areas in our data.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Convenience stores
7-Eleven started in Texas, but it has since spread across many blue places.
Locations per voter
Regional convenience store chains in redder areas include Casey’s General Store and Allsup’s.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Religious institutions
The headquarters of the Mormon Church are in blue Salt Lake City. But it has many temples in rural parts of the Mountain West.
Locations per voter
First Congregational Church, on the other hand, is a common name for a church in the United Church of Christ, a socially liberal Protestant denomination common in New England.
Locations per voter
First United Methodist churches are in redder areas:
Locations per voter
Hindu and Buddhist temples are both typically in more liberal areas.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Professionals
Occupations also have recognizable patterns in our data, probably in large part because of the rural-urban political divide.
Some professions lend themselves to cities:
Locations per voter
Others, to the countryside:
Locations per voter
And yet others can find business just about anywhere:
Locations per voter
Leisure
A lot of the activities we do for fun also map across politics.
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Locations per voter
Services
Even basic services follow similar patterns. Fire departments skew red because they have to be everywhere, regardless of how many people live there. Even a small, rural area needs a fire department. When you consider population density, you get this:
Locations per voter
Elementary schools, meanwhile, are more population dependent.
Locations per voter
Train stations, including those with subway stops, tend to be in more urban areas.
Locations per voter
And propane suppliers, though everywhere, typically have more business in rural areas, farther from natural gas pipelines.
Locations per voter
Taken together, the patterns are a reminder of how big and varied the country is — in its places and its politics.
You can explore the distribution of 100 large coffee chains, grocery stores, shops and other places below.
See More: Political Geography of 100 Large American Businesses
Methodology
Place of interest data is from Meta and Microsoft via the Overture Maps Foundation. Nearly 10 million places were used in this analysis. This is the most comprehensive data set of its kind available publicly, but it is by no means perfect.
The data includes businesses and places that have logged their locations on either Meta or Microsoft platforms as of Oct. 23, either through an individual social media account, or when a large chain offers all of its location data to the platforms. Locations may also be included if they were mentioned by users in posts to Meta and Microsoft apps.
The data includes some erroneous locations, typos, mislabeled locations and closed stores. It may also omit businesses that have not yet put their information online. To limit the inclusion of bad data, we filtered the data using Overture’s confidence measure and excluded locations with fewer than 15 votes.
The 2020 precinct-level election results were compiled from Harvard Dataverse. For each precinct, the vote margin was calculated by comparing the number of votes for Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
