| In case anyone was curious about the methodology behind the quiz, here's what I did. The US Census Bureau defines metropolitan areas using counties (and county equivalents, such as independent cities, Louisiana parishes, and DC) as the basic unit (see here for full list: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/bulletins/b10-02.pdf). One or more counties (or county equivalents) constitute a metro area; for example, the Boston metro area is composed of Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk Counties in Massachusetts and Rockingham and Strafford Counties in New Hampshire. The source given for the quiz, the US Election Atlas, provides county-by-county breakdowns of votes for the major candidates in US presidential elections. I added up the votes for all counties within metro areas that had a total population of 500,000 or more in the 2010 Census (there were 102) and found the total percentage of votes in each of these metro areas for Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. I then averaged the three percentages for each county and party and took the top 25 most Democratic and top 25 most Republican metro areas. |
'B' World Metros
'M' World Metros
Largest Second Place Cities
