A 90-second tour of 14 big cities

A 90-second tour of 14 big cities

An interactive map published by The New York Times allows you to explore the 2016 presidential election at the highest level of detail available: by voting precinct.

This map, although nearly two years old, continues to define American politics. The vast majority of people who voted for Donald J. Trump say they approve of his job performance today, while the vast majority of Hillary Clinton voters say they disapprove.

On the neighborhood level, many of us really do live in an electoral bubble, this map shows: More than one in five voters lived in a precinct where 80 percent of the two-party vote went to Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. But the map also reveals surprising diversity.

(We've also created a tool that allows you to examine the data in a more personal way. It’s here.)

Fine detail and big-picture context

The election results most readers are familiar with are county maps like the ones we produce at The Times on election night. But votes are cast at a much finer unit of geography — in precincts, which may contain thousands of voters but in some cases contain only a handful. Our previous election maps contained results for about 3,100 counties; here we show results for more than 168,000 voting precincts.

Here’s the view of the New York area mapped both ways:

The precinct-level data was compiled by Ryne Rohla, a doctoral student at Washington State University, who obtained it from government websites and election officials. Because these results are not standardized within a state or sometimes even within a county, the vote totals do not perfectly match official tallies. About 3 percent of the votes cast for Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are missing from this data. But those missing votes — many of which are provisional or absentee ballots — would probably not change the winner in many precincts. Even where the vote counts are perfect, the difficulty of matching the election results to the precinct map can lead to additional, if only occasional, errors.

The map we published also offers two bits of additional context to help you think about the 2016 vote.

First, we give you a measure of how the area around a precinct compares with other areas. That measure is based on the choices of the nearest 100,000 voters, as well as those within a 10-mile radius.

Second, we tell you how long it would take you to drive, without traffic, to the nearest precinct that voted for the other candidate of a major party. By these measures, for example, the area around the Times headquarters in Manhattan had a higher share of Clinton voters than 96 percent of the country, and the nearest Trump precinct, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a 36-minute drive away.

We invite you to explore the map in detail. We’ve identified some highlights below.

Voting enclaves: Educational, religious, ethnic

Even in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, there are small pockets that went the other way. There are blue parts of even the reddest states, and vice versa.

In Kansas, where Mr. Trump won all but two of the state’s 105 counties, blue precincts dot the countryside, including in places like Liberal, Kan., one of several small towns across the Plains with significant Hispanic populations.

Young voters and voters with postgraduate degrees strongly preferred Mrs. Clinton in 2016, and it’s not surprising when these voters are packed into the confines of a college campus and its surroundings. Mr. Trump won Knox County, Ohio, by nearly 40 points. But one of its precincts contains the village of Gambier, home to Kenyon College. Voters there gave Mrs. Clinton more than 90 percent of the vote.

Colleges can contrast with their surroundings in the opposite way, too. Evangelical voters broke strongly for Mr. Trump, and so did several precincts containing Baptist and evangelical colleges, including in otherwise blue Dallas.

Historic markers: The past remains present

The nation’s fraught racial history still shapes election patterns today, particularly in the South.

You might imagine that the Deep South, one of the most reliably Republican regions of the country, is a homogeneous zone of Republican strength. Instead, it’s a patchwork of overwhelming Democratic and Republican precincts, sometimes right next to each other. Democratic strength isn’t even confined to the cities, as it is in much of the rest of the country. It's an artifact of segregation in the most racially polarized part of the country.

The Democratic precincts across the region — a crescent that stretches through the lowland South to the Mississippi Delta — correspond to the Black Belt, a region originally named for its dark, fertile soil, not for the millions of slaves who worked the land or their descendants, many who still live and vote there more than 150 years later.

In 2016, white voters in the rural Deep South supported Mr. Trump with more than 90 percent of the vote. Black voters voted for Mrs. Clinton by an equally lopsided margin. If you look for a while, you can find adjacent precincts where Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump each won more than 95 percent.

Smaller-scale artifacts of history are also visible in the precinct map.

Consider Langston and Boley, Okla., formerly all-black towns founded in the Oklahoma Territories after the Civil War (Oklahoma became a state in 1907). These areas still have large African-American populations and voted overwhelmingly for Mrs. Clinton. The areas surrounding them are majority white, and strongly favored Mr. Trump.

Bright borders: Where votes trace city limits

Arbitrary municipal borders are very real dividing lines in politics. In many metro areas, voters need only cross a city line to find communities with totally different school systems, policy preferences and politics.

Such a political contrast at the border is particularly clear to the south and east of Baltimore. On the southern edge of the city, voters in parts of the Cherry Hill neighborhood of Baltimore voted 95 percent for Mrs. Clinton. Across the city line in Baltimore Highlands, on the other side of Patapsco Avenue, 69 percent of voters supported Mr. Trump.

The precincts just north of Detroit voted for Mrs. Clinton — but not by quite the overwhelming margins of those inside the city. Eight Mile Road, well known for dividing Detroit from the more prosperous suburbs, is instantly legible on this political map, too.

Some other places where a city or county boundary seems to jump off the map: Memphis, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Dallas.

Democratic bastions: Cities’ hues of blue

Mrs. Clinton won nearly 80 percent of the vote in the five boroughs, producing a net margin of about 1.7 million votes, but there are strong concentrations of Republican votes across the city. Neighborhoods like Borough Park, home to one of the largest Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish populations in the United States, were about as red as precincts in the rural white South. Mr. Trump won Staten Island, by 15 points (though not the part by the Staten Island Ferry terminal).

You can travel 75 miles down the Lake Michigan coast from the northern Chicago suburb of Waukegan to Gary, Ind., and on the entire way encounter only one small cluster that voted for Trump: the fancy North Shore suburb of Lake Forest. It’s among the wealthiest suburbs in the region, and highly educated, too. About 80 percent of adults there have a college degree.

No county in America voted more strongly for Mrs. Clinton than the District of Columbia. Only 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s current neighbors, in the precinct surrounding the White House, voted for him. And the president would have to travel about 20 miles in any direction from the White House, beyond the Beltway, to find a precinct that voted for him.

Most of Philadelphia is uniformly deep blue — so blue, in fact, that in 2012 it was the source of some (false) claims of voter fraud because many districts there produced not a single vote for Mitt Romney. The city’s vote in 2016 was also one-sided, with several precincts in our data showing zero Trump votes.

There are no red suburbs surrounding San Francisco or in the East Bay. There is only blue — and water. Some of the blank patches on the map cover parks, quarries or airports. There are some Trump precincts near Berkeley and Richmond, but those are areas with very few voters. It’s a lot easier to find precincts where Jill Stein took second: Just explore the area around Berkeley.