How Red and Blue America Shop, Eat and Live

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Its competitor Chick-fil-A — despite an early 2010s controversy over gay rights — is also in many blue areas.

Among the chains found in redder places are Tennessee-based Hardee’s and Oklahoma-based Sonic.

And Burger King, like McDonald’s, is everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

Convenience stores

7-Eleven started in Texas, but it has since spread across many blue places.

Regional convenience store chains in redder areas include Casey’s General Store and Allsup’s.

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.

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.

First United Methodist churches are in redder areas:

Hindu and Buddhist temples are both typically in more liberal areas.

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:

Others, to the countryside:

And yet others can find business just about anywhere:

Leisure

A lot of the activities we do for fun also map across politics.

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:

Elementary schools, meanwhile, are more population dependent.

Train stations, including those with subway stops, tend to be in more urban areas.

And propane suppliers, though everywhere, typically have more business in rural areas, farther from natural gas pipelines.

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.