Jacksonville is the 12th-largest city in the United States and largest in Florida.
The Jacksonville result is a close call, so I agree that it’s difficult to say with certainty whether Trump won that city. The Fort Worth result looks a stronger case, but we can’t really say anything conclusive without being able to separate the votes coming from the city, from the votes coming from the rest of the county.
My information maybe out of date, but I remember studying how Jacksonville and Duval are a city-county in my State and Local politics class. This was at Florida State so we spent a lot of time studying Jacksonville and Duval and comparing their efficiency as opposed to places like Broward county which has quite a few incorporated cities.
Sorry for the hijack, but it is an interesting bit of trivia.
It’s been a while since I lived in Florida, but San Fran is definitely the “City and County of San Francisco”. No real separation at all. It’s probably easier when the county is 7 x 7 miles.
Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center (a moderate, “liberaltarian” think tank) talks about the density divide (full PDF paper). It’s not so much the size of the city, but the population density that is predictive of vote share. Take a look at the charts on page 8 of the PDF.
It didn’t used to be the case that density predicted partisan vote share, but it’s certainly true now. And, because our system was designed to give a relative advantage to low density regions, the Republican Party now has much more power than would be expected from its vote share. And the divide is getting wider as self-sorting continues.
Interesting to see how it has changed over time. Maybe with high-speed broadband and infrastructure improvements, there could be less of a pull to the cities in future decades, and maybe even a reversal of the trend.
Good find, as well as snapshot of a county. Turnout was a bit higher in places Trump won, reflecting an energized base.
If I looked at the right precincts and didn’t double-count anything, it looks like Hillary Clinton won Jacksonville (Duval County except for the beach cities and Baldwin) by 495 votes. (If I missed any, she won by more. Trump won every precinct anywhere near those areas.)
I remember noticing that at the time and wondered what had happened. Check out post #25 and look at the link RickG shared. Population density seems to correlate to voting for Democrats. I’m curious if that could be what happened in Du Page? If so then the GOP should be concerned about their future in states like Ohio, Florida, Texas, etc as the suburban counties around the cities see increases in density.