Analysis
Which kinds of places moved between 2018 and 2022, and what to read on Nov. 3
Which kinds of communities moved between the 2018 and 2022 midterms, and which community types to read in each 2026 Senate battleground on Nov. 3.
In the 92 Texas counties the American Communities Project classifies as Hispanic Centers, 966,389 people voted for governor in 2022, which is 81,241 fewer than in 2018. Greg Abbott’s margin in those counties grew from 6.6 points over Lupe Valdez to 11.9 points over Beto O’Rourke, while the rest of Texas moved 3.5 points toward the Democrat. Five of the 92 counties moved toward the Democrat by more than the rest of the state did.
The same comparison, run for every community type in 12 states, 11 with 2026 Senate battlegrounds plus Pennsylvania, ranks the types by how they moved against the rest of their own state between the two midterms. The Urban Suburbs ran ahead of the rest of their state in all 10 comparisons where they appear. Working Class Country, Aging Farmlands and Hispanic Centers ran behind in every one of theirs. In the Ohio and Pennsylvania Senate races, every type moved toward the Republican; the ranking describes which moved less.
The American Communities Project sorts each of the nation’s roughly 3,100 counties into one of 15 community types. Its current typology dates from 2023 and was built with Matt Grossman, a Michigan State University political scientist, according to the project’s methodology page. A k-means cluster analysis of about three dozen census and religious-adherence measures guided the grouping, which was then edited by hand to stay consistent with ACP’s original 2012 types. Matched to the MIT Election Data and Science Lab’s precinct returns, the typology covers 1,107 counties in the 14 comparisons used here: the governor’s races in all 12 states, plus the Ohio and Pennsylvania Senate races.
Each comparison pairs different candidates, so the measure here is relative. For each community type in each race, the type’s swing between 2018 and 2022 is set against the swing of every other county in the same state. A positive number means the type moved toward the Democrat more, or away from him less, than the rest of its state. Averages below are weighted by each comparison’s 2022 vote unless stated otherwise.
Suburbs and exurbs
The 30 Urban Suburbs counties in these states ran 5.1 points ahead of the rest of their states, and 36 of 38 county-level comparisons beat the figure for the rest of the state. In Texas, the eight Urban Suburbs counties moved 7.2 points toward O’Rourke while the rest of the state moved 1.4. In the Pennsylvania Senate races, the five moved 4.5 points toward the Republican and the rest of the state moved 9.6.
The 59 Exurbs counties ran ahead in 12 of 14 comparisons, by 4.7 points, and cast 5.7 percent more votes for governor in 2022 than in 2018. Between Sherrod Brown’s 2018 Senate win in Ohio and Tim Ryan’s 2022 loss, the rest of Ohio moved 13.7 points toward the Republican and its five Exurbs counties moved 4.0.
Big cities
The 14 Big Cities counties ran 4.2 points ahead of the rest of their states, but in only five of 10 comparisons, and they cast 8.2 percent fewer votes for governor in 2022 than in 2018. Minneapolis and St. Paul’s two counties ran 10.7 points ahead of the rest of Minnesota, and Texas’ five ran 6.1 ahead of the rest of Texas. In the governor’s races, Atlanta’s Fulton County ran 1.4 points behind the rest of Georgia, Detroit’s Wayne County 1.9 behind the rest of Michigan and Philadelphia 2.2 behind the rest of Pennsylvania, and Wichita’s Sedgwick County matched the rest of Kansas within a tenth of a point.
Hispanic Centers and the rural types
Hispanic Centers ran behind the rest of their states in all six comparisons, by 8.5 points, and their vote for governor fell 8.3 percent. Texas holds 92 of the 108 such counties in these states. Working Class Country ran behind in all 12 of its comparisons, by 4.4 points, with the largest gap in Ohio’s Senate race, 11.9 points. Aging Farmlands ran behind in all seven, and Rural Middle America, which has more counties here than any other type, 313, ran behind in 10 of 12.
The Middle Suburbs
Dante Chinni wrote for ACP on Oct. 14 that the Middle Suburbs “bear close watch” in tight races this year in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa, and counted seven such counties in Michigan, 10 in Ohio and two in Iowa. Wisconsin is not among the states analyzed here; for the other three, the match finds the same counts. Between 2018 and 2022 the Middle Suburbs stayed close to the rest of their states, within 5.5 points in each of seven comparisons, ahead in four and behind in three. Ohio, with 20 of the 46 county-level comparisons, pulled the weighted average to -1.1 points; unweighted, the seven comparisons average -0.1. In the Ohio governor’s race, its 10 Middle Suburbs counties moved 5.4 points more toward the Republican than the rest of the state did.
What to read on Nov. 3
The table lists, for each 2026 Senate battleground, the three community types that cast the most votes in the closest comparable race of each cycle. In several states the 2018 and 2022 columns are different offices, named in the first column, so the change between them is not a swing. The full sheet, every type in every state for both the Senate and governor’s races on Tuesday’s ballot, is data/baselines/benchmarks_2026_by_type.csv, and the county sheet now carries each county’s type.
| State (races compared) | Community type | Counties | 2018 margin | 2022 margin | Share of 2022 vote |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Georgia (governor 2018, Senate 2022) | Urban Suburbs | 7 | +18.5 | +23.8 | 31.2% |
| African American South | 63 | +10.8 | +11.9 | 19.4% | |
| Exurbs | 11 | -47.8 | -40.9 | 11.6% | |
| Iowa (governor 2018, Senate 2022) | Rural Middle America | 80 | -17.8 | -30.5 | 50.2% |
| Urban Suburbs | 1 | +18.3 | +12.7 | 15.7% | |
| Middle Suburbs | 2 | +9.8 | +3.9 | 12.9% | |
| Kansas (governor 2018, Senate 2022) | Exurbs | 2 | +15.4 | -0.9 | 27.1% |
| Rural Middle America | 38 | -14.4 | -50.4 | 25.4% | |
| College Towns | 6 | +28.6 | -2.2 | 16.2% | |
| Maine (governor 2018, governor 2022) | Graying America | 13 | +3.0 | +6.8 | 58.9% |
| Exurbs | 1 | +26.4 | +40.2 | 24.0% | |
| College Towns | 1 | -4.0 | -5.3 | 10.2% | |
| Michigan (Senate 2018, governor 2022) | Urban Suburbs | 2 | +9.5 | +18.9 | 21.0% |
| Rural Middle America | 29 | -15.5 | -13.2 | 20.6% | |
| Middle Suburbs | 7 | +3.5 | +6.1 | 20.2% | |
| Minnesota (Senate 2018, governor 2022) | Big Cities | 2 | +50.2 | +44.3 | 31.6% |
| Exurbs | 7 | +11.8 | -3.0 | 23.3% | |
| Rural Middle America | 47 | +2.2 | -25.1 | 19.7% | |
| Nebraska (Senate 2018, governor 2022) | Big Cities | 1 | +4.0 | +5.0 | 28.6% |
| Rural Middle America | 27 | -42.8 | -50.9 | 24.6% | |
| College Towns | 4 | +3.2 | -4.0 | 20.4% | |
| New Hampshire (governor 2018, Senate 2022) | Exurbs | 3 | -10.5 | +7.3 | 64.0% |
| Graying America | 5 | -5.7 | +7.0 | 21.4% | |
| College Towns | 2 | +5.9 | +19.7 | 14.6% | |
| Ohio (Senate 2018, Senate 2022) | Rural Middle America | 48 | -21.4 | -39.0 | 23.7% |
| Big Cities | 2 | +41.2 | +34.0 | 20.2% | |
| Middle Suburbs | 10 | +3.7 | -11.4 | 19.1% | |
| South Carolina (governor 2018, Senate 2022) | Urban Suburbs | 3 | -18.9 | -34.1 | 22.0% |
| Working Class Country | 11 | -28.3 | -45.2 | 20.0% | |
| College Towns | 3 | +18.9 | +0.2 | 18.8% | |
| Texas (Senate 2018, governor 2022) | Big Cities | 5 | +22.1 | +16.7 | 41.0% |
| Urban Suburbs | 8 | -7.8 | -12.6 | 19.9% | |
| Hispanic Centers | 92 | +4.6 | -11.9 | 11.9% | |
| North Carolina (no 2018 statewide race; Senate 2022) | Big Cities | 2 | +29.2 | 21.6% | |
| College Towns | 9 | +23.0 | 18.4% | ||
| Working Class Country | 18 | -31.8 | 11.3% |
Margins are the Democrat’s share minus the Republican’s, in points of all votes cast, summed across the type’s counties.
These are counties, not voters. A type’s movement can come from who turned out as much as from who changed sides, and the Texas Hispanic Centers moved on a smaller electorate: Abbott’s margin there grew by 5.3 points in a year when 81,241 fewer people voted.
Notes and sources
File names in this section refer to the project’s working data files, which are not yet public. The data and code are available from the author on request.
Results: MIT Election Data and Science Lab, Precinct-Level Returns 2018 by Individual State (doi:10.7910/DVN/NVQYMG) and Precinct-Level Returns 2022 by Individual State (doi:10.7910/DVN/UYQIEP), CC0, aggregated to counties by pipeline/clean.py. Community types: American Communities Project, 2023 typology, the “Community Type Sheet” linked from americancommunities.org/methodology (file 2023-Typology-1.xlsx, read 2026-11-02); the sheet spells one type “Urban Burbs,” which ACP’s site and this piece call Urban Suburbs. ACP states no license for the sheet; the raw file stays local and the type labels are cited to ACP. The relative-swing measure (against the rest of the state), the counts and the benchmarks are the author’s analysis, computed by pipeline/communities.py.
| Passage | Figures | File |
|---|---|---|
| Texas Hispanic Centers lede and close | 92 counties; votes 1,047,630 and 966,389; margin -6.62 to -11.91 (swing -5.29); rest of state +3.52; 5 of 92 above the rest-of-state swing | data/baselines/by_type_comparison.csv (TX, GOV, Hispanic Centers) |
| Scope and measure | 12 states (GA, IA, KS, ME, MI, MN, NE, NH, OH, SC, TX with 2026 Senate races; PA); 14 comparisons; 1,107 unique counties; relative swing = type swing minus the swing of all other counties in the same race | pipeline/communities.py |
| Urban Suburbs | 30 unique counties, 38 county-comparisons, 36 above the rest; weighted +5.14 (unweighted +5.26); 10 of 10; Texas 8 counties, swing +7.23 against +1.38; Pennsylvania Senate 5 counties, -4.47 against -9.60 | by_type_summary.csv; by_type_comparison.csv |
| Exurbs | 59 unique counties; 12 of 14; weighted +4.65 (unweighted +4.35); governor votes 4,194,588 to 4,433,413 (+5.7 percent); Ohio Senate 5 counties, -4.02 against -13.73 | same |
| Big Cities | 14 unique counties; weighted +4.17 (unweighted +2.50); 5 of 10; governor votes 7,435,738 to 6,823,228 (-8.2 percent); Minnesota +10.67, Texas +6.14; Georgia -1.44, Michigan -1.94, Pennsylvania governor -2.22, Kansas -0.06 | same |
| Hispanic Centers, rural types | Hispanic Centers 0 of 6, weighted -8.48 (unweighted -10.31), governor votes -8.3 percent, 108 counties (92 in Texas); Working Class Country 0 of 12, -4.44, Ohio Senate -11.87; Aging Farmlands 0 of 7; Rural Middle America 313 counties, 2 of 12 | same |
| Middle Suburbs | Michigan 7, Ohio 10, Iowa 2 counties (matches ACP’s Oct. 14, 2026 article by Dante Chinni, which also names Wisconsin); relative swings -5.43 to +5.15; 4 of 7; Ohio governor -5.43 | same; americancommunities.org, “Why the Middle Suburbs Stay So Pivotal in American Politics” |
| Benchmark table | generated, not typed | data/baselines/watchlist_2026_senate_by_type.md from pipeline/watchlist.py |
Alaska is excluded because ACP types its boroughs while its returns here are by state house district. North Carolina appears in the benchmark table but not in the 2018-to-2022 comparisons, because it held no statewide race in 2018. Maine’s 2018 Senate race and Alaska’s 2022 ranked-choice races are excluded from all margin comparisons; see data/MANIFEST.md.
Changelog
- Published.
Hesitation Media sends new records to the newsletter first. Subscribe on Substack.