Source: Wikipedia (and below)
Bill Turner knew he had a tough job. He took over as acting director of voter services in Chester County, Pa., in September, just two months before a divisive presidential election amid a pandemic. Huge voter turnout was expected, and COVID-19 required election managers like Turner to handle mail-in ballots on a scale they'd never seen and confront the threat of their staffers becoming sick.
These challenges had forced many election offices to burn through their budgets months earlier. Turner had previously served as the county's emergency manager, experience that seemed apt for overseeing an election that many observers feared would become a catastrophe.
With a tight budget and little help from the federal government, Chester County applied for an election grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a previously small Chicago-based nonprofit that quickly amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to help local election offices — most notably, $350 million from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Brookings, 2/4/2021
Since at least the 2000 presidential election, pundits, scholars, and the general public have conceptualized the country’s partisan landscape using the blue states, red states, and swing states framework. But despite its ubiquity, this structure ignores how intrastate regional tensions and political competition imbue the divisions between red and blue America. Differences within states also anchor the long-standing urban-rural divide—a salient feature of American politics since the country’s founding.
Austin American-Sgtatesman, 3/17/2022
Nearly a dozen Republican-led states have banned private donations for election administration, and more bans are under consideration. Denouncing "Zuckerbucks" for election offices has become part of the GOP playbook for candidates running for local, state and federal offices.
Republican groups and politicians objected to Democratic strongholds getting the largest amounts of money, although every jurisdiction that applied received money. Grants ranged from $5,000 for small townships to the largest grant of $19 million for New York City.
FiveThirtyEight, 10/10/2021
The state as a whole has long voted reliably Republican, but about two-thirds of Texas’s population lives in one of the state’s four huge metropolitan areas — Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. If you combine all the votes there, Democrats improved their margin by more than 5 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, carrying these areas 52 percent to 47 percent in November. This shift is significant because even though Texas’s border counties moved sharply to the right in 2020 — *Starr County, for instance, swung a staggering 55 points toward Republicans — Democrats’ gains in those four big cities and their suburbs added almost five times as many votes as Republicans’ gains in 28 counties along or near Texas’s border with Mexico.*That's 6,189 votes out of a total voting population of 18,975,542.
New York Times, 12/7/2020
The Hill, 12/21/2021
Fewer than half of the 3,143 counties in the United States added population over the last decade, the new census data shows. The share of Americans who live in nonmetropolitan rural areas dropped by 2.8 percentage points, the Bureau said Thursday.
As of April 2020, just more than 86 percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas, counties that include or are adjacent to major cities with populations of 50,000 or more, an all-time high.No wonder the GOP wants to take us back to the 19th century.
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