American Flags Are Not Useful Political Clues, And Other Lessons From Google Street View

We recently showed Times readers images culled from Google Street View of 10,000 neighborhoods around the United States. Could readers guess, we wondered, how residents in a given place voted in the 2020 presidential election just by eyeballing a typical street scene?

Our neighborhoods were representative of where American voters live, meaning they included about the right number of urban precincts, like this one in brownstone Brooklyn …

… and more rural areas like this one outside Effingham, Ill.:

Not surprisingly, readers nearly aced places like these, accurately guessing that city residents generally voted for Joe Biden and farm-country ones for Donald J. Trump.

But the game was harder than many readers expected, in part because most voters live in between these two extremes.

They live in places like this around Las Vegas …

… or outside Spokane, Wash. …

… or Valparaiso, Ind.:

Places like these confounded our readers. And that may be expected: These precincts were very closely decided in 2020 and don’t fit neatly into any stereotype about Red or Blue America.

Our Street View scenes also have very few people in them, and so they offer few hints about the demographics of local voters. They show, instead, information about driveways, lawns, cars and houses.

Since our quiz was first published a little over a week ago, Times readers have made more than 15 million guesses about the politics of these 10,000 neighborhoods, giving us a better sense of how people perceive partisanship when given just these environmental clues. Most Times readers appeared to recognize the relationship between population density and politics (the denser a community, the more reliably Democratic it is, in general).

But as a group, Times readers did show a subtle bias in their guesses, toward Mr. Trump: When shown a scene from a competitive precinct, they were more likely to guess that Mr. Trump carried it than Mr. Biden.

We also suspect that some readers ascribed too much political meaning to pickup trucks and American flags. And readers looking for socioeconomic signals may have been foiled, too.

Here is some of what we learned from all these guesses — the right ones and the wrong ones. But first, if you haven’t played the game yet, we suggest you do that now.

The easy ones: packed cities and open skies

Below are the scenes that garnered the most accurate guesses from readers (here we’re showing you a small thumbnail of each, but in the game you can pan around every street in more detail). Readers almost universally pegged the neighborhoods at left as voting for Mr. Biden, and those at right as voting for Mr. Trump:

Clearly, Times readers have learned well that urban and rural America have different politics — a geographic divide that wasn’t so stark just a few generations ago.

The hardest ones: rural Biden, urban Trump

The scenes readers most frequently got wrong were often ones that broke this general rule. If you tripped over these, we get it (we tripped over them, too).

These images look like the reverse of the photos above: Now we have rural places that backed Mr. Biden on the left and urban neighborhoods that voted for Mr. Trump on the right.

The single greatest outliers in the whole collection, shown among the pictures above, were in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn (in a precinct that voted for Mr. Trump by 52 points) and in a corner of Santa Rosa, Calif. (where Mr. Biden prevailed by 46 points). Readers almost universally got these two wrong.

The role of income

If you could accurately estimate the income level of a neighborhood, that would be another helpful clue. Both the richest and poorest places voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden. But it’s not so easy to determine income — even at the extremes — from a single Street View image.

Among the precincts within the highest-income census tracts in our sample — places where the average household earns more than $150,000 a year — 81 percent voted for Mr. Biden (readers guessed Biden about 61 percent of the time). Below we’re showing you the very richest of those rich places, which tilt even more heavily toward Biden. There are a few gated walls here. But other scenes look almost rural, spoiling our density rule. A lot of money can buy you a very large wooded lot with few neighbors nearby and a house set far back from the road.

Among census tracts below $27,000 in median income — close to the poverty line for a family of four — 89 percent of precincts voted for Mr. Biden (readers said 64 percent). But for the most part, those images don’t telegraph clear signals about income, either.

One of them shows a sidewalk homeless encampment on Skid Row in Los Angeles. But others capture a high-rise public housing development in Manhattan, a child care center in Vicksburg, Miss., and a block of handsome single-family homes in Huntington, W.Va.

Tricks readers said they tried: flags, trucks and sidewalks

Readers told us they had varying strategies for navigating this game. Some focused mostly on housing density. Others looked for the make and model of cars, or even the number of cars in a driveway (many cars might mean overcrowded working-class households with more than two working adults).

Some readers treated the presence of sidewalks as a proxy for density: Sidewalks are often missing in communities where there’s not much nearby to walk to. We also heard from readers confident that American flags and pickup trucks were clear indications of a community’s more conservative politics.

To test some of these ideas, we selected hundreds of images from our collection where these features appeared prominently.

Flags

We found that American flags don’t reveal much about a place’s politics. Among scenes we assessed that featured a prominent American flag, those places nearly evenly split 50-50 between Trump and Biden precincts. (Readers guessed the streets were in Trump precincts by about 60 percent to 40 percent.)

Some sample flags from Renton, Wash.:

Philadelphia:

Plainfield, Vt.:

Overland Park, Kan.:

Seneca, S.C.:

Trucks

Pickup trucks were even less useful as a political signal of a Trump area. If you suspected a truck meant a more Republican-leaning precinct, you were more likely to be wrong than right: About 57 percent of places we identified with prominent pickup trucks were in Biden precincts. As a group, readers guessed Trump about 60 percent of the time in places like these.

Below, some of the places where pickup trucks were prominent in our sample:

Jonesboro, Ark.:

Albuquerque:

Manhattan:

Bakersfield, Calif:

Los Angeles:

Sidewalks

Sidewalks were much more common in these scenes than flags or trucks. And they were indeed a decent way to approximate density — and, by extension, to gauge politics. Among the sidewalk scenes we found, about 70 percent were in places that Mr. Biden carried.

Around Tucson:

Toledo, Ohio:

Sonoma, Calif.:

Seekonk, Mass.:

Lewisville, Texas:

The presence of sidewalks might be particularly useful in sorting inner-ring suburbs built before World War II (which lean Democratic) from newer, more car-dependent exurbs (which lean Republican), or in identifying the close-in neighborhoods of smaller towns.

The magic density tipping point

As we suspected, readers tended to struggle with suburban-looking neighborhoods, the sort that are, on average, more evenly divided between Democratic and Republican voters.

Population density is a helpful tool — if you let that be your only guide, you could do pretty well in this game. Where density doesn’t help as much is at the threshold between urban and rural.

If we’re being exact, that threshold is in places that have about 848 voters per square mile. Nearly 75 percent of precincts denser than that backed Mr. Biden, and nearly 75 percent of precincts less dense than that backed Mr. Trump. Understandably, most of us are terrible at picturing population density in the real world — what do places with 848 voters per square mile look like?

Well, they look like this:

Main Street(s), U.S.A.

This last set of images is not particularly revelatory about political geography in America today. But we think it’s fun.

When you sample 10,000 addresses from neighborhoods all across the country, you get a lot of homes on Main Street. One hundred and thirteen of them, to be exact, across 30 states, from rural Minnesota to the heart of El Segundo, Calif. Here are all of our Main Street scenes in their cumulative glory. There are about twice as many Trump neighborhoods as Biden ones in this group.

Source: Elections - nytimes.com