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Since November I've been trying to wrap my head around what really happened _where_ in the midterms: this article just out with the folks at @washmonthly is my effort to answer that. (Thread) washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/09/wha…
The story of the midterms was Dems' sweep of "the suburbs." Theda Skocpol and I had written 8 mos earlier about the massive surge in grassroots activism in the suburbs. Was this about the impact of the suburban grassroots we'd profiled? Well, maybe. democracyjournal.org/arguments/midd…
But in between I had done alot of traveling & talking & doorknocking for candidates way outside the prosperous metropolitan rings where grassroots groups are densest. Most of these places look nothing like "suburbs" you envision, even if they fall in districts classified that way
These were mill towns & river towns. Communities left behind when capital moved on faster than the families it had drawn here. Shuttered factories; Hail-Mary industrial parks. PA, OH & MI have the 3rd, 4th & 5th largest rural populations in the country. The Rust Belt is rural too
In all these places I saw newcomers & old radicals and labor loyalists coming together to run DIY campaigns up & down ballot against all odds. What did the midterm results have to tell us about places like this? It was hard to say, because it was hard to identify them. "Suburbs"?
Then Gabriel Perez Putnam and I stumbled across @jerry_shannon 's dataset of SNAP authorized dollar stores, which Shannon used to produce this hypnotic (and depressing) time-lapse map of the spread of dollar stores across communities over time
@jerry_shannon Dollar stores are like an opportunistic infection: they identify points of vulnerability, latch on, and make things worse ilsr.org/dollar-stores-…
@jerry_shannon (Of course, dollar stores aren't joyless, nor useless. If you live out in the country and stop by often for milk, the teller probably welcomes you & the kids by name. But a community where meals are routinely sourced from these shelves is a community that deserves better options) 
@jerry_shannon Each dollar store location reflects real decisions by real people seeking real profits. How many low income customers are nearby? What other options do they have? How cheap is the rent? Is there a chamber of commerce or health equity strategic plan standing in the way?
@jerry_shannon Less dense places have more dollar stores per capita in part because customers are spread out. But all these dimensions of disadvantage shape placement as well. So counting dollar stores turns out to be a useful way to make visible the range of non-urban hardship in America today
@jerry_shannon Dollar stores let us talk about patterns across space beyond just urban vs suburban vs rural. Instead they offer measurable and meaningful shades of gray. Here's how life expectancy per congressional district correlates to SNAP authorized dollar store count (2008-2018 total)
@jerry_shannon This thread is now longer than the article but let me throw in thankyous because every article needs acknwldgmts. @jerry_shannon created & shared store location dataset. @djpressman & @eitanhersh reassured us the story was worth telling (errors remaining aren't their fault tho!)
My fabulous coauthor Gabriel Perez-Putnam (not #onhere) kept inventing creative ways of showing what the data showed. This one is US political shifts from 2012 to 2016. Color is congressional incumbent after Nov 16. Prosperous &compact Romney-Clinton districts couldn't be clearer
And here's what happened this Nov. That red dot way up in the Romney-Clinton column? Will Hurd's TX-23, 72 dollar stores: a very different place from the tony suburbs below, all of which flipped. Meanwhile lots of purple diamnd/Dem flips in 30-60 dollar store districts Trump won
And here in orange are the seats that went uncontested by Dems in 2016 but where Democrats ran in 2018. That's the locally-driven rebuilding "across a geographic spectrum that would have seemed impossible two years ago" Skocpol and I described last summer newrepublic.com/article/150462…
Here was the answer to our original question. Where did Dems make gains in Nov 2018? Waaay beyond prosperous suburbs. All across the Rust Belt & Appalachia &South. (These dots don't even show seats newly contested in '18, those deep rural districts where Dems finally tried again)
Part of the urgency of this story, for me, is I hear from so many folks working to rebuild a presence in places where, without their labor-of-love face-to-face campaigns, the only way "Democrats" reach voters is through the distorting screen of Fox News
After 2016 it looked like the growing alignment of America's geographic, socioeconomic & political divides was going to keep hardening. But that's *not* what happened next. Nov 2018 results tell a new story: one of political dynamism in places that don't make national headlines
Here's that new dynamism nationwide. 2018 margin swing in districts held by GOP in 2016 (not even showing seats Dems didn't contest in 2016). That's an awful lot of red arrows headed away from polarization. Well-off suburbs are only a little piece of this big story.
We were especially happy to publish this in @washmonthly which has carried a series of important recent pieces on rural America in all its complexity, diversity, and possibility washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/janua…
If you haven't yet read @dblock94's deep description of local Democrats' labors in VA-06 (note: 75 SNAP-authorized dollar stores in our dataset) go read now! washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novem…
