The temptation to over-interpret.

This is from a year ago. The Geography of Partisan Prejudice: A guide to the most—and least—politically open-minded counties in America by Amanda Ripley, Rekha Tenjarla, and Angela Y. He.

The overall study is a mess. Too few people surveyed for the number of variables they are interest and on top of that they then use statistical profiles as a proxy. As a consequence, the findings have to be treated with deep skepticism. It is not that they are definitely wrong. It is that we can't be confidant that they are right.

This is the paragraph which caught my eye.

In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity. They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives, as Mutz describes in her book Hearing the Other Side.) By contrast, many nonwhite Americans routinely encounter political disagreement. They have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be.

Certainly true in my experience, and we see this reflected in the mainstream media, cocooned as they are in a handful of big cities, socializing primarily with other prestige university college and masters adorned high income individuals with strong partisan views and little exposure to the great diverse glory of our country.

The winner for most intolerant county based on their methodology?

Nationwide, if we disregard the smallest counties (which may be hard to pin down statistically, since they have fewer than 100,000 people), the most politically intolerant county in America appears to be Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes the city of Boston. In this part of the country, nine out of every 10 couples appear to share the same partisan leaning, according to the voter-file data. Eight out of every 10 neighborhoods are politically homogeneous. This means that people in Boston may have fewer “cross-cutting relationships,” as researchers put it. It is a very urban county with a relatively high education level. All these things tend to correlate with partisan prejudice.

Must have been a close run thing with Silicon Valley where I have experienced the greatest uniformity of political views and greatest animosity towards those not sharing those views.

A couple of other notes.

By contrast, the North Country, in far upstate New York, just east of Lake Ontario, seems to be more accepting of political differences. The same seems to be true in parts of North Carolina, including Randolph, Onslow, and Davidson Counties. In these places, you are more likely to have neighbors who think differently than you do. You are also more likely to be married to someone from the other side of the aisle. It’s harder to caricature someone whom you know to be a complicated person.

[snip]

And in America, people who live in cities (particularly affluent, older white people) can more easily construct work and home lives with people who agree with them politically. They may be cosmopolitan in some ways and provincial in others.

a final oddity. They produce two maps of the nation by county - those places where Democrats are most strongly prejudiced against Republicans and those places where Republicans are most prejudiced against Democrats.

In general, as makes sense, it appears that mistrust breeds mistrust. If county Democrats are strongly prejudiced against Republicans, then there is a high probability that Republicans will be highly prejudiced against Democrats. And vice versa.

With one glaring exception. In the deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia and Louisiana), Democrats are deeply and pretty uniformly prejudiced against Republicans whereas Republicans tend to express relatively little prejudice against Democrats. Even in Florida, one of the most politically prejudiced states, Democrats in every county are deeply prejudiced against Republicans whereas the Republicans in about 20% of the counties only have a light prejudice against Democrats.

I am guessing that this is related to the conversion of the South from a Democratic bastion to a Republican stronghold in 1980s and 1990s when the Democrats became more academic, culturally progressive, more Wall Street than Main Street, and more immigrant focused than blue collar focused.

My supposition is that the high Democratic intolerance for Republicans is simply the intolerance that the old guard has for the usurper. The high Republican tolerance for Democrats is out of social ties: no matter how Republican a family or community becomes, there are still older, respected members of that family/community who have lifelong fealty to the Democratic party.

But the most important thing from the article - it is based on a survey sample size of 2,000. Nothing can be said with confidence about the indicated results. It has too weak statistical a foundation.