The standard story of American political geography is a one-way ratchet. Bill Bishop called it the Big Sort: decade after decade, more of us live in landslide places, packed in among people who vote as we do. Jonathan Rodden gave it an electoral edge in Why Cities Lose — Democrats, crammed into hyper-blue urban precincts, "waste" votes by winning their own neighborhoods 90 to 10, while Republicans spread more efficiently across the map.
Three cycles of precinct returns — the scale of an actual polling place, far below the county lines most maps stop at — show the ratchet slipping. From 2016 to 2024 the country's neighborhoods grew less sorted, not more: more voters in competitive precincts, fewer in blowouts. And the single clearest movement is the one Rodden's thesis turns on. The Democratic packing premium — how much more lopsided the average Democratic vote's precinct is than the average Republican's — fell from nearly 12 points to 3. The deep-blue precinct started to thin out.
None of this undoes a half-century of sorting in eight years, and most of it traces to one realignment (more on that below). But it is a real, measurable loosening, and you can only see it from underneath the county.
The packed party unpacked
Measure packing simply: of all the votes a party won, what share came from precincts it carried by 60 points or more — an 80–20 blowout. In 2016 the two parties were wildly asymmetric. 24.8% of Hillary Clinton's votes came from 80–20 precincts, against just 13.2% of Donald Trump's — a near-12-point gap, the statistical signature of Democrats stacked into landslide cities while Republicans spread thinner across suburb and country.
By 2024 the gap had all but closed. The Republican figure barely moved (13.2% to 12.6%); rural red precincts stayed as red as ever. But the Democratic figure collapsed to 15.6%. Kamala Harris won the same kinds of places Clinton did, but by smaller margins inside them — the 90–10 precinct became the 75–25 precinct. The packing premium fell from 11.6 points to 3.0.
The packing premium collapsed
Share of each party's two-party votes cast in precincts it won by 60+ points (an 80–20 landslide), by cycle. The shaded gap is the Democratic packing premium.
The distribution slid toward the center
Line up every vote by the margin of the precinct it was cast in, and the shape of the country redraws itself across the three cycles. The deep-Democratic tail on the right — the 80–20 and 90–10 precincts — visibly deflates from 2016 to 2024, and the mass piles back toward the middle. The Republican tail on the left holds far steadier. This is the asymmetry from the first chart, seen whole: the country didn't de-sort evenly, the blue end did the moving.
Where the votes piled up, three cycles
Share of the two-party vote cast in precincts of each margin, by year. Same election geography, viewed as a distribution.
The cities converged inside themselves
Because precincts are redrawn every cycle, you cannot follow one precinct through time — but you can follow a county, and ask whether its precincts grew closer together or further apart. For each county with enough precincts in both elections, the map below shows the change from 2016 to 2024 in how spread out its neighborhoods are (the vote-weighted standard deviation of its precinct margins). Nationally that internal spread fell 2.5 points; the teal counties are where neighborhoods converged.
Change in how divided each county is inside, 2016→2024
Vote-weighted standard deviation of a county's precinct margins in 2024 minus 2016, in points. Teal = neighborhoods converged; orange = pulled further apart. Counties need 10+ reported precincts in both years; others are beige.
It was overwhelmingly a big-city story
Sort the same counties by how urban they are, and the unpacking is lopsided. In large metro cores, the share of the county's Democratic votes sitting in 80–20 precincts fell by 7.2 points between 2016 and 2024. In rural counties it barely moved — 0.7 points. The 2024 realignment that gets described in demographic terms — Democrats slipping with Hispanic, younger, and non-college voters who are concentrated in cities — lands, geographically, as the de-densification of the deep-blue precinct.
The unpacking was concentrated in the metro core
Change 2016→2024 in the share of a county's Democratic votes cast in its 80–20 precincts, vote-weighted mean by USDA urbanization class.
What this shows — and what it doesn't
This is a short window and a partial reversal, not the end of the Big Sort. The decades-long sort into landslide counties is real and largely intact; what these three cycles show is that beneath it, between 2016 and 2024, neighborhood-level sorting eased — and most of that is the 2024 realignment compressing Democratic margins in the places Democrats were most packed. Whether it persists depends on whether that realignment does. The measure is robust to one obvious worry: precincts were redrawn each cycle, and 2024 actually has more precincts than 2016, which should reveal more extremity, not less — so the de-sorting is, if anything, understated. But it is geography, not people: precincts are not a panel, so we describe how the distribution moved and which counties converged, never a precinct or a voter followed over time. The "who" here is a county type, not an individual — attaching neighborhood demographics would need precinct boundaries this analysis does not use. Everything is two-party (Trump vs the Democratic nominee); turnout and third parties are set aside.