Have been thinking about the parallels between UK and US elections, and the most obvious one is about geography - in particular, metropolis vs periphery (1/?)

We're seeing all these US states which are a sea of red with a few blue counties - but the blue ones are the cities where all the people are. Cities are going for Biden, rest of the country is going for Trump.

A big reason Biden is going to win is the suburbs - these big Democratic urban areas sending missionaries out into their surroundings and gradually, inexorably turning them blue

It's a political and cultural tension beautifully encapsulated in this piece about the attempt to kick Chicago out of Illinois https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2019/05/14/behind-the-movement-to-kick-chicago-out-of-illinois

But obviously, this is a huge factor in UK politics too. We keep talking about the 'Red Wall', but Boris's victory was a more general victory of towns over cities - Labour won London, Leeds, Liverpool, Tories won the areas surrounding them

And you can go further and hypothesise that this is the big divide in British politics just as it is in American - that as David Goodhart and others have argued, city vs non-city is the great cultural/political/economic fault line

This isn't just an Anglo thing either - Christophe Guilluy's 'Twilight of the Elites' is essentially an apocalyptic French take on the same trends https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2019/03/alex-morton-riots-looting-pillaging-yellow-vests-france-shows-what-britain-could-face-if-brexit-is-blocked.html

I'll leave the question of what this means for politics to wiser heads - eg James Frayne, who has been way ahead of everyone else on this. But one implication is that the big political battleground is the interface between these zones - the suburbs.

And another is that you can't win just on a pure core vote campaign, of the kind Trump tried. The myth is that Boris did it too, but the genius of 'Get Brexit Done' is that it appealed to those who just wanted it to end as well as those who really wanted to happen...

Added to this are the demographic trends - these big cities are churning out younger left-leaning voters, who are slowly pushing into conservative heartlands.

For example, Ian Warren of Election Data has done good work showing how high house prices/cost of living have pushed Lab voters out of London into the wider South-East - just as Texas etc have been recruiting liberal types from high-cost California