I absolutely love specific, symbolic details in Big Picture stories based on trends in statistics and culture.

During what we could call America’s “Divided We Fall” era (let’s hope that it passes), there are all kinds of ways to illustrate the tensions between blue citizens and red citizens. NPR recently did a feature — “Americans are fleeing to places where political views match their own“ — that had a great cultural detail way down in the script that suggested there’s more to this divide than politics.

The key fact: In the 2020 election, Joe Biden “won 85% of counties with a Whole Foods and only 32% of counties with a Cracker Barrel.”

What was missing in this fine, must-read story? It’s that issues of faith, morality and culture have just as much to do with America’s blue-red schism as politics. As the old saying goes, partisan politics is downstream from culture. If you have doubts about that, check out this GetReligion commentary on the classic 2003 “Blue Movie” essay in The Atlantic. Author Thomas B. Edsall observes:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions.

Note the religion question in that mix. Thus, the Big Idea in this Edsall essay?

According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors—and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).

The new NPR piece, while stressing politics, does contain a few killer cultural details. The religious elements of the story? There are hints, but that is all. This is a good story, but — as we have been saying here at GetReligion for nearly two decades — it is “haunted.” Here is the overture:

There's a private Facebook group with nearly 8,000 members called Conservatives Moving to Texas. Three of them are sitting at a dinner table — munching on barbecue weenies and brownies — in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. None are vaxxed. And they love it here.

"As soon as I drove into Texas, literally, as soon as I could get into the state and stop at my first truck stop for gas it was, like, 'This is wonderful,' " says Lynn Seeden, a 59-year-old portrait photographer from Orange County, Calif. "People weren't wearing masks — nobody cared. It's kind of like heaven on earth."

She says when the state of California forced her to close her photography studio over COVID-19 restrictions, she and her husband, a retired newspaper editor, knew it was time to "escape." 

America is growing more geographically polarized — red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.

Now for a positive comment about this NPR feature.

Frequently, stories of this kind feature all kinds of information that make it seem like the Big Idea in question is something new. I really appreciated that this story flashed back to some of the evidence that this “new” “sorting” trend has actually been gaining power during recent decades.

In other words, there is more to this than COVID-19 vaccines and the political beliefs of Americans who voted for He Who Must Not Be Named (think “orange man'‘). The divide between George W. Bush and Al Gore is basically the same as the one between the “hotter” clash between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

So three cheers for NPR for including the following two chunks of background information.

First, from 14 years ago:

"Groups of like-minded people tend to become more extreme over time in the way that they're like-minded," says Bill Bishop, a journalist who wrote the influential book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart in 2008.

Bishop's book explains how Americans sorted themselves by politics, geography, lifestyle and economics over the preceding three decades. Sitting in a Central Texas café, Bishop says that trend has only intensified in the 14 years since the book's publication.

"They are still sorting themselves in ways that end up that places are increasingly Republican or increasingly Democratic," he says. "Then you can see that playing out in Congress. There are fewer people in the middle. And so politics becomes less about solving our problems anymore. It's about cheering for our side. And so we're stuck."

A “lifestyle” divide? Any chance that this is code for “religion”?

Meanwhile, here is another way to label the “sorting” phenomenon, a political term dating back nearly two decades:

Political scientist Larry Sabato posted an analysis … that shows how America's "super landslide" counties have grown over time. 

Of the nation's total 3,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80% of the vote — has jumped from 6% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.

Later on in the story, there was another ironic detail that caught my eye.

No one is surprised — after waves of headlines — that plenty of Californians are heading to Texas (#DUH). But can anyone spot the off-key note in this final clip from the NPR report?

Residents have been fleeing states like California with high taxes, expensive real estate and school mask mandates and heading to conservative strongholds like Idaho, Tennessee and Texas.

More than one of every 10 people moving to Texas during the pandemic was from California, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. Most came from Southern California. Florida was the second biggest contributor of new Texans.

Florida? I’d like to know more about that trend. How about you?

In conclusion, this is a solid NPR report that’s worth your time. Then click on the links in this post and fill in some of the missing details. Deal?