In Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard outlines the findings of Nationhood Lab’s recent analysis of the 2024 presidential election
For Washington Monthly, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard wrote about Nationhood Lab’s recent analysis of the 2024 presidential vote via the lens of the U.S. regional cultures identified in the American Nations model. It shows how centuries-old settlement patterns have resulted in surprisingly stable partisan voting patterns over the past quarter century and more.
The online piece focused on new research published last month examining how the various U.S. regional cultures voted in November and how that compared with not only the previous “Trump elections” in 2016 and 2020, but with all presidential elections going back to the 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The big takeaway was how little the partisan preferences of the U.S. regions had changed.
“A quarter century of drama and upheaval—hanging chads, falling towers, forever wars, failing banks, deadly variants—and most of the country’s regional cultures have barely budged their partisan leanings,” Woodard wrote. “In most regions, this was Donald Trump’s best election yet, but his ethnonationalist agenda still underperformed George W. Bush’s corporate neo-conservatism, albeit during wartime.”
The work examines the effects of the regional differences using the historically-based regional model first described in Woodard’s 2011 history, American Nations, that is based on First Settler effects and the geography of colonization. Woodard has previously used the model to examine the 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests, the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms, and key off-year contests in 2013 and 2011, as well as a wide range of social, health, historical and policy phenomena in American life.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, examines regional issues in American life and has developed a revised civic national story for the 21st century United States tied to the ideals in the Declaration.